Chapter I: Nature of the Soul
In his work, “On the Soul,” Aristotle defines the soul as “the first entelechy (or perfection) of a natural organized body possessing the capacity of life.”
This definition clearly means that the soul is a form or function of an organized body and is incapable of independent, separate existence. But in the same work Aristotle poses the question as to whether the soul may not be the entelechy of the body in the sense in which a pilot is the entelechy of a ship.
This question reflects Aristotle's hesitation as to whether the human intellect may not be separable after physical death, while the rest of the soul perishes, and it is probable that he believed in the survival of the human intellect after it is developed by purely intellectual operations. His great commentator and systematizer, Alexander of Aphrodisias, explicitly holds this view, i.e., that the human mind achieves immortality by contemplating eternal objects.
Plotinus, who believes in the existence of the World Soul (of which individual souls are modifications), rejects the Aristotelian definition of the soul as entelechy of the body.
In the amalgamation of Aristotelianism and neo-Platonism created by later Hellenic philosophy, particularly as expressed in the neo-Platonizing commentators of Aristotle, the human soul was credited with indestructibility, although the Aristotelian definition of soul as entelechy was also subscribed to.
Among the Muslim philosophers who were heirs to this philosophic tradition of later Hellenism, al-Farabi explicitly identifies the human soul at the beginning of its career as a faculty or power inherent in the body and not as a spiritual substance capable of existing independently of the body. When, however, the human soul - the material intellect - develops into an actualized intellect and can think immaterial forms, al-Farabi designates it as “acquired” intellect.
The “acquired” intellect emerges as a part of the intelligible universe and survives physical death. According to al-Farabi, therefore, human souls which have not developed into actualized intellect cannot survive bodily death, since they are mere “powers” in the body. This doctrine of the transformation of the human soul into an immaterial, immortal entity appears to be similar to the doctrine of Alexander of Aphrodisias. In other words, for al-Farabi, whereas the human soul in its initial stage is the entelechy of the body in the first of the two Aristotelian senses, it becomes entelechy of the body in the second Aristotelian sense (i.e., in the sense in which a pilot is the entelechy of a ship) at the end of its developmental career.
The souls of the heavenly bodies are, however, eternally entelechies of their bodies in the second sense, since they never were mere powers or potentialities immersed in their bodies.
For Ibn Sina, the human soul, although it is only a potential intellect at the beginning of its career, is nevertheless an immaterial spiritual substance capable of existing independently of the body.
The body is there to serve the purpose of its realization as actual intellect, but after that it becomes a positive hindrance. Ibn Sina, therefore, holds that it is better to define the soul as entelechy of the body than to define it as form of the body; this is because 'entelechy comprises both types of soul, that which is the form of the body and hence inseparable from it - as in the case of the vegetative and animal souls - and that which is separate (or separable) from it, as the human soul. But this means that the term “entelechy” is ambiguous; therefore, when we say that something is an entelechy, we do not know thereby what kind of soul it is - whether it is capable of existence by itself or not.
Again, according to Ibn Sina, the definition of the soul as “entelechy” (although he thinks that this is the best possible and most comprehensive definition of the souls “in this world of ours”) besides being ambiguous, does not include all the souls, e.g., the souls of the heavenly spheres, which neither work through a physical organ - since they are eternally immaterial substances - nor do they possess sense-perception, while their intellect is also eternally actual and not potential and passive as the human intellect.
It is obvious that, basically, these objections arise against Aristotle himself, who was the author of the soul's definition as entelechy of the body, but who at the same time regarded the souls of the heavens as eternally actual and movers of the heavenly bodies.
When we have defined the soul as entelechy of the body, Ibn Sina goes on, we have only defined the soul as a relation, for entelechy, actuality or perfection is entelechy, actuality or perfection of something viz., of the body, possessing organs. This definition, therefore, does not yield the nature of the soul-in-itself, i.e., whether it is a separate substance or not. In order to prove that the human soul is an immaterial spiritual substance, Ibn Sina has, therefore, recourse to his famous argument whereby a person, under certain suppositions, can affirm his own ego without affirming the existence of his body.
Ibn Sina's conception of the human soul as an immaterial substance ab initio (most probably motivated by religious considerations) raised fresh objections against him to which an Aristotle or an al-Farabi was not subject. One of his contemporaries asked him: if the human soul is a separate substance from the start, why is it not an actual intellect and only a potential one, since the only condition of something being an intellect and intelligible in actuality is that it be separate from matter? To this Ibn Sins replied that for something to be an actual intellect, it is not sufficient to be separate from matter but to be absolutely separate from it, i.e., that matter should neither be the occasion of its coming-into-existence nor the vehicle of its subsistence.
The unsatisfactoriness of this reply continued to be a target of criticism and Mulla Sadra rejects Ibn Sina's view in various contexts.
Mulla Sadra, who is highly neo-Platonic in his theory of knowledge, as will become clear in the following chapters, nevertheless accepts Aristotle's definition of the soul as entelechy of the body. According to him, since the soul is not eternal but originated (a proposition in whose acceptance he is at one with the entire Aristotelian tradition), it cannot be separate and independent of matter, for to say that the soul is separate and independent of matter is only compatible with belief in the pre-existence of the soul, as Platonists and neo-Platonists believe. Ibn Sina is, therefore, self-contradictory when he accepts the one but rejects the other. At the same time, Sadra also rejects Ibn Sina's view that the soul is a relational concept and not a substantive one. Since the soul, at its birth, is in matter, its soul-ness cannot be construed as a relation as though it had an independent existence of its own and then came into a relationship with matter. Again, if the human soul were an independent substance, it would be impossible to integrate the soul and body, so as to form a natural physical species as the concept of ''perfection” requires, and therefore the analogy of the pilot and the ship falls to the ground.
However, the relationship of the soul to the body is not like that of any ordinary physical form to its matter. All physical forms inhere in their matters in such a way that the two do not constitute a composite (murakkab) of two existentially distinguishable elements, but are totally fused together to form a complete unity (ittihad) in existence, and as a result, the form works simply and directly in matter. As opposed to purely material forms, however, the soul works on its matter through the intermediacy of other lower forms or powers. This phenomenon, viz, where one power or form works on matter not directly but through other forms, is called “soul.” Sadra, therefore, says that the soul is the entelechy of a material body insofar as it operates through faculties, and he insists that the word “organs” as it appears in the Stagirite's definition of the soul cannot mean “physical organs” like hands, liver or stomach, for example, but faculties or powers through which the soul works, as, for example, appetition, nutrition, and digestion.
It is obvious that this novel interpretation constitutes a grave violence against Aristotle, since his language clearly attributes the quality of “being organized” or “possessing organs” to “the natural body,” which makes the soul, strictly speaking, a function of such a body, while Sadra attributes the quality of having “organs'' or “faculties” to the soul.
This position is, indeed, a radical departure from Aristotle and should be regarded as a first step toward the final idealization of Sadra's account of the soul. Sadra claims that this interpretation of the word “organs” removes the difficulties experienced by the definition of the soul as entelechy in covering all the cases - from plants to heavenly spheres - since all souls work on their bodies not directly but through faculties. Further, it raises the soul from the status of a purely physical form to a form which, although in matter, is capable of transcending it, for the extent of its immanence in matter is less than that of a simple physical form. These considerations should not lead us to think, however, that Sadra has produced this definition for extraneous reasons for, as will become apparent soon, this way of looking upon the soul is intimately related to his doctrine of “emergence” or “substantive change” which lies at the root of his system.
Indeed, the ability of Sadra's definition to comprehend the souls of the heavens is a by-product and is relevant only from the point of view of the Peripatetic philosophy. Otherwise, whereas according to the Peripatetics, the souls of the heavens are eternally actual and, therefore, are not in need of a bodily organ to actualize them and hence are not entelechies of their bodies except insofar as their bodies occupy different positions in their revolutions, according to Sadra, these souls are only potential like earthly souls even though the degree of their potentiality is less than that of earthly souls.
Indeed, as we have shown in Chapter V of Part I, the heavenly souls, together with their bodies, are hadith or originated according to Sadra, and subject to continuous movement and change.
Concerning Ibn Sina's doctrine on the heavens, Sadra says:
Among (the failures of Ibn Sina) is his assertion that the heavenly souls have no perfection waiting to be realized except in certain extraneous matters and non-essentials, viz (different) relations of positions for their bodies. For a man of insight who has grasped the truth, this is a baseless opinion and a false belief. This is because the soul, so long as its psychic being remains deficient and not perfectly realized in point of its proper individual (level of) existence, is in need of the body to serve as its instrument for the attainment of its existential perfection,
and it must cling to it.... How can a man of perception and insight believe that a (pure) intellective substance can allow itself to be imprisoned in a bodily relationship, deserting its abode of light for (this) tenebral world merely for the sake of acquiring extraneous relationships with physical positions - and this despite their (the philosophers') doctrine that the higher does not occupy itself with the lower?
Thus, for Sadra, celestial souls are, in principle, as much entelechies of their bodies as earthly souls.
Sadra's own account of the soul rests on his fundamental principle of “emergence” or “substantive change” (istihala jauhariya). He, therefore, holds that the soul is bodily in its origin but spiritual in its survival (jismaniyat al-huduth, yuhaniyat al-baqa').
The same principle demands that, since the soul emerges on the basis of matter, it cannot be absolutely material, for “emergence” requires that the “emergent” be of a higher level than that which it emerges out of or on the basis of. Consequently, even the lowest forms of life - like plants, although they are attached to and dependent upon matter, cannot be themselves entirely material. On the contrary, they use their matter or body as their instrument and constitute the first step away from the material to the spiritual realm (malakut).
Being entelechy of the body means that the soul renders the genus “body” into a species, i.e., a living body. This means that “body” must enter into the definition of plant, animal, and man, as Aristotle and Ibn Sina say. However, since, for Ibn Sina, the term “soul” applies only to a relation and not to a substance, he thought that the body was extrinsic to the soul when considered as a substance. He, therefore, denied physical resurrection.
But certain later Muslim philosophers, like al-Suhrawardi went farther off the track. They did not see that the “body” in this context had to be taken in the sense of a genus and not in the sense of a material substratum - as Ibn Sina had insisted - and when they saw the material substratum to be perishable, they declared body to be dead-in-itself and devoid of life which, they thought, was merely accidental to it - i.e., they did not consider “body'' as part of the definition of a living being.
Again, being entelechy of a special type of body means that the soul falls into the category of substance, since such a body cannot be constituted without the soul. This argument comes from Ibn Sina Ibn Sina, however, had given another proof, referred to above, based on direct consciousness of the self, to establish that the human soul is a spiritual substance, independent of the body. Yet, in strange contradiction to this proof, when Ibn Sina was asked if substantiality is a constitutive factor of the soul, why are we not able to affirm its substantiality as serf-evident, without inference, he replied, “About the soul we know nothing except that it governs the body:
in its essence, it remains unknown. Now substantiality is constitutive of that essence... but what is constituted by substantiality is unknown to us and what is known to us is not constituted by substantiality.”
It is obvious that Ibn Sina is thinking here of the general definition of the soul as entelechy of the body and does not refer to his special proof which is based on direct experience of the self.
After Ibn Sina, the question was raised and discussed whether the substantiality of the soul is given in direct serf-consciousness. Al-Suhrawardi, since he believed Aristotelian categories to be purely subjective, asserted that in the direct experience of the self all that was given was a serf-aware or self-luminous being to which all other concepts like substance, differentia, etc. were extrinsic.
He, therefore, describes the self only as a self-luminous being, of the nature of light. Sadra approaches this question from his principle of the primordiality of existence (asalat al-wujud) discussed in Chapter I of Part I, according to which the only reality is existence and essences are constructed by the mind.
According to him, whenever soul is conceived as a concept and is defined, it will be found to be an essence. In direct serf-experience, however, soul is only given as pure existence, and since existence has no genus, it is not given in experience either as a substance or non-substance. Direct, intuitive experience is the only way, for Sadra, to know reality, for discursive inferential reasoning can only know essences in an adequate manner (bi'l-iktinah), anti not existences, which are unique.
According to Sadra, both human and animal souls are free from matter and hence capable of existence independently of the body. We shall discuss the question of the human soul later, but the doctrine that the animal soul is capable of independent existence is not found even in al-Suhrawardi and appears to have come from Ibn Àrabi, to whom, as our previous discussions have shown, Sadra's debt is immense. The reason for this doctrine, in part, is to prove that simple human souls which possess hardly any intellective activity, but simply work with imagination also survive, as we will elaborate in Chapter V of the present Part on eschatology.
But Sadra absolutely holds that a being endowed with imagination is independent of natural matter even though it is not independent of a certain kind of extension and quantity (miqdar) which, however, is not material. This view, in turn, rests on his doctrine of the Àlam al-Mithal (World of Images), according to which, an image, although not spiritual, is not material either, is not directly subject to substantive mutation as the world of physical forms and, therefore, exists by itself independent of matter. Ibn Sina himself, although he gave an elaborate argument in his al-Najat and al-Shifa' to show that an image requires a material organ to be imprinted in and that therefore imagination could not survive physical death, said in al-Mubahathat that “If the percipient (faculty or organ) of perceived forms and images were a body or a bodily power, then either that body will suffer separation (tafarruq, i.e., discontinuity) of parts when nutrition enters upon it or it will not.
The second alternative is false because our bodies are subject to ceaseless corrosion (by fatigue) and augmentation through nutrition.”
His conclusion was that such a faculty must be non-material.
But after Ibn Sina a whole new development takes place, whose terms go back to al-Ghazali, but which explicitly starts with al-Suhrawardi, according to which images had an independent existence and life of their own in the World of Images (Àlam al-Mithal) situated ontologically between the spiritual (intelligible) world of pure ideas and the world of coarse matter and material bodies.
This development made it easier for Sadra to believe that imagination - the World of extended figures - was not part of the material realm. Sadra, therefore, holds that self-consciousness is not restricted to the rational soul, i.e., man - as philosophers had held but was a concomitant of imagination as well. Ibn Sina was puzzled when asked whether animals have self-consciousness and whether an animal being has a principle in it which preserves that being's identity throughout life even though its body was in constant change. He replied that perhaps animals are not conscious of themselves but only of the objects they perceived and reacted to, or maybe they have a vague awareness of themselves through perception of external objects.
On the second question, he was extremely hesitant and pointed to several alternatives among which he did suggest that animals (and perhaps plants) may have an irreducible original factor.
Be that as it may, Sadra categorically affirms that animal souls are capable of survival, because they are separate from matter - thanks to the fact that they have imagination - and that their separateness is not inconsistent with attachment to the quality of extension (or “pure body”) which is necessary for an image. Sadra uses the age-old argument for the identity and persistence of the human soul, according to which human bodies are in perpetual change while the inner psyche remains the same, to prove the identity and Persistence of the animal soul, since animal bodies are also in Perpetual flux while their inner psyche remains the same. It is obvious, says Sadra, that this argument applies to animals as it applies to man.
Similarly, the philosophers' argument from serf-knowledge to prove that the human soul is separate from the body, is applied by Sadra to the animals - those higher forms of animal life where sense-perception, some kind of memory-image, and voluntary movement are found. Since animals flee from things causing pain and pursue things giving pleasure, they must have an adequate idea of these things in terms of their images. In doing so, animals must necessarily perceive themselves.
Following the neo-Platonic model, Sadra asserts that in sense-perception itself, it is not the external object which is directly perceived; the external object is rather the occasion for the creation by the soul of a perceptible form from within itself. This is much more so in the case of unperceived forms or images which the soul creates by itself.
Hence the animal soul is independent of the material body. Again, the animal's self-knowledge is direct, continuous, and independent of its knowledge of the external objects, exactly as is the case with man.
Sadra even goes so far as to apply Ibn Sina's argument about the immateriality of the human self on the basis of direct self-consciousness to the animal soul. The only difference between man and animal is that the former is capable of intellection which the latter is incapable of; but then even many men are equally devoid of intellectual capacity and work by sheer imagination.
Sadra's view that animal souls are capable of detachment from their bodies - indeed, he insists, they are in some sense detached from their bodies because they are of the order of “actual imagination (khayal bi'l-fìl),” as distinguished from developed human souls, which are “actual intellect (àql bi'l-fìl)” - is based on the important doctrine of the “World of Images (Àlam al-Mithal),” developed after al-Ghazali by al-Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi, and others. According to this doctrine, the ontological structure of reality comprises three worlds - that of pure ideas or intellectual entities on top, of pure images or figures in the middle, and of material bodies at the lowest rung.
Developed animals and undeveloped humans are of the order of the middle world of pure figures: although they cannot rise to the status of pure intellects, they nevertheless belong to the “other world (al-akhira)” compared to this material world which is subject to that perpetual flux to which even the human and heavenly souls are subject so long as they have any inter-course with the physical and are not developed and transformed into pure imagination. But at the same time it is difficult to see how imaginative souls can be completely freed from matter and cease to be subject to perpetual material flux if they have not become pure intellects - a condition stated recurrently by Sadra - and have found final repose in the eternal realm and being of God.
The development of the soul, according to Sadra, is marked by successive stages of increasing unity and simplicity - an application of his principle of substantive motion. Whereas the faculties of plants are diffused throughout their body, the sensitive soul of animals achieves a higher grade of unity, since the sensitive soul, at the level of sensus communis, is able to combine all sense perceptions. However, the sensitive soul operates through bodily organs which are diverse and spatially localized even though the subject of perception are not these organs but is the soul itself.
Imagination is the first “separate” faculty and does not work through any bodily organ. Imagination, however, entails the extension of the image (although the image does not occupy real space and is not material); and hence not being totally free from some notion of spatiality, it does not possess unity and simplicity proper.
This doctrine of the progressive simplicity and unity of the soul clearly belongs to the neo-Platonic type of thought, although it is not foreign to Aristotelianism. At the level of the human conceptual thought, the soul achieves an adequate measure of unity, for a concept is neither localized anywhere in the body, nor is its object material or in matter; it is pure form without matter and in its intention it denotes an infinity of objects to which it is applicable. A concept is, therefore, truly spiritual. However, concepts as such are mutually exclusive and are therefore plural.
Although concepts emerge from the soul (as we shall see in the following chapter), nevertheless a knowledge of external, physical objects - which are the paradigm of the absence of unity - is necessary for their emergence.
Concepts are therefore connected in some sense with physical objects. It is only when the soul truly becomes “mind” or “acquired intellect,” i.e., when it becomes creative of concepts independently of knowledge through the instrumentality of the body, that it becomes genuine unity and achieves a “simple” level of being which belongs originally to separate intellects.
At this point Sadra attacks Ibn Sina's doctrine of the “simple intellect” and its relationship to the psychic or conceptual intellect and says that, according to Ibn Sina, the only difference between these two levels of intellect is that what the simple intellect has as a unity - without a temporal succession of concepts but with a logical and causal order - the conceptual intellect possesses in inferential and temporal order and, further, that the simple intellect creates these concepts whereas the conceptual or psychic intellect only receives them. Sadra accuses Ibn Sina of not having properly understood the nature of the simple. For Ibn Sina, the simple principle creates concepts but these latter do not actually exist in it but outside it; whereas, for Sadra, the more simple a principle is, the more it is able to contain, in a simple form, all the things below it.
The consequences of this difference appear both on the question of God's knowledge (which, according to Ibn Sina, is accidental and external to the Divine Essence, while, according to Sadra, divine knowledge is inherent in God's essence in a simple manner, as we have seen in Chapter II of Part II), and on the question of the relationship of the soul to its faculties. That the soul operates through different faculties is undeniable. The “latter-day” philosophers like Abu'l-Barakat, Fakhr al-Din al Razi, al-Iji, and others, however, misunderstood the basis on which earlier philosophers affirmed the different faculties of the soul and thought that their basis was that every faculty, being simple, produces only one type of act.
This is not true; the real principle for the differentiation of faculties is either the fact that one type of action can exist - e.g., nutrition - without the other - e.g., growth, or the fact that two types of action are positive but contradictory as, e.g., assimilation of food and its expulsion.
Otherwise, different acts can be performed by the same faculty as, for example, nature, although simple, creates motion in a body when it is out of its natural place but produces rest in it when it is in its natural place. Starting from this misunderstanding, these philosophers and theologians came to deny multiplicity of faculties and powers in natural objects.
Faculties, however, are not independent or quasi-independent entities possessing essential differentiae, as vegetative or animal species do. Their differentiation is merely through accidents of the human soul in the sense that some of them function in time prior to others and also through localization of different functions through different organs.
Faculties, as such, do not exist; yet Sadra does not say that they are distinguishable only conceptually, and thinks that they are, in a sense, real.
How, then, are we to conceive of their relationship to the soul?
Sadra says, “The soul is all of the faculties.”
This is not to be understood to mean that the soul is the collection or aggregate of the faculties, since an aggregate for Sadra has no existence apart from the particulars which make it up.
It is rather to be understood on the basis of Sadra's general principle, discussed several times earlier in this work, that “a simple nature is everything.”
That is to say, what the multipilicity is at one level of existence, unity is precisely that at a simpler, higher level of existence. Faculties are the “modes (shu'un)” or “manifestations (mazahir)” of the soul: at their own level, the faculties are real, at the higher, simpler level, they are swallowed up by the soul, whose creations they are at the lower level but wherein they exist as a unity at the higher level. They are related to the soul as servants are related to the king or as angelic beings and cosmic intelligences are related to God.
That the soul, as the true spiritual self, is a unity in all experience is affirmed by philosophers and the attacks of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi upon them that they regard faculties as subjects of experience as though “ in a single human person there exists a host of cognizers” are simply puerile.
What is true is that philosophers, including Ibn Sina himself, have sometimes talked as though these faculties were independent existents and hence misunderstandings arose about the proper relationship between the soul and its faculties. The fact is that the soul does not emerge as a genuine and complete unity until it reaches the status of the acquired intellect. Two difficulties prevented Ibn Sina from the achievement of this insight. First, as has been pointed out earlier, he did not quite understand the nature of a simple principle. Secondly, Ibn Sina did not accept the principle of substantive change (haraka fi'l-jauhar), which could have led him to hold that at the level of acquired intellect the soul achieves a new order of existence and emerges as a pure intellect.
Al-Suhrawardi, although he enunciated the principle of “more perfect” and “less perfect,” did not come to the idea of substantive change and hence he experienced the same difficulty in de-fending the unity of the soul. In fact, he believed that vegetative functions, since they are physical (and everything physical is, for him, dead-in-itself), are not due to inherent powers or faculties of the soul, but emanate directly from the “Giver of Forms,” i.e., the Intellect or Pure Light, and that faculties only prepared the subject for the reception of these forms. Now, there is an obvious difference between that which prepares and that which causes or necessitates (i.e., between the receptive and the productive principles), the heating power of fire, for example, is not just preparatory for the heating operation but necessitates or causes it.
The truth is that, in accordance with the principle of substantive change or transformation, which is also expressed by the doctrine of the systematic ambiguity (tashkik)
of existence, the soul first emerges as vegetative, then as perceptive and locomotive at the animal level, then as potential intellect, and finally as pure intellect when the term soul is no longer applicable to it. The soul has its being at all these levels and at each of these levels it is the same in a sense and yet different in a sense because the same being can pass through different levels of development.
Ibn Sina had given an excellent example of the relationship between the soul and its faculties from the physical realm when he said that a body may be so related to fire that the former may be only heated by the latter, or it may be so related to the fire that the latter both heats and illuminates that body - in which case, the higher statc, the illumination, becomes the cause of the former state, the heating - or, finally, it may be so related to the fire that the sun not only heats and illuminates that body but sets it aflame - in which case, the flame becomes the cause (together with the original fire) of both heat and illumination. Nevertheless, Ibn Sina himself, while describing the relationship of the soul to the body, had used contradictory language: on the one hand, he describes the faculties as emaciating from (faid) the soul, which is regarded as their source (manba`, while on the other he described the soul as a mere link (ribat) integrating the faculties and their activity and called it the meeting point (majma`) of the latter. Now this latter conception is against the idea of the soul as a genuine, transcendent simple entity.
Indeed, when the soul achieves its highest form as true unity, it contains all the lower faculties and forms within its simple nature. The commonly held view that when the soul becomes fully developed and separate, it negates and excludes the lower forms, is a cardinal error; many philosophers misconstrue the meaning of “abstraction” as “removal” or “negation” of something.
True unity and simplicity does not negate but comprehends everything. That is why the soul, at the highest stage of its development, resembles God, for God, in His absolute simplicity, comprehends everything.
Such a soul begins to function like God and creates forms from within itself: indeed, at this stage, the Perfect Man becomes the ruler of all the worlds - physical, psychic, and intelligible - as Ibn Arabi has it. The Perfect Man, according to Ibn Àrabi, must function directly through the simplicity and unity of his mind, and not through instruments, in order for his will to be obeyed by the entire creation. Such a Perfect Man is the Perfect Saint. But should this Perfect Man choose to work through external instruments - i.e., as a prophet - and enunciate external laws and commands, he may be obeyed by a segment of the creation and disobeyed by another segment. This is nothing surprising and does not detract from the perfection of the Perfect Man, since this is the very nature of functioning through external instruments as distinguished from functioning through the unity of the inner mind. For God Himself, when He decided to work externally through commands and instruments, was disobeyed by a part of His creation, viz., Satan. But at the level of His Divine Unity, where instruments are non-existent, God's obedience is assured by definition, as it were, for there, since his Unity includes all, Satan himself is part of it.
According to Sadra, just as the soul comes into existence as an individual as a power in matter - although not as a power of matter - so it retains its individual character even when it is severed from the body and becomes a member of the Divine Realm. As we shall see later in his doctrine of eschatology, he rejects the transmigration of souls as well as the view that, after death, the individual souls dissolve themselves in the ocean of Eternal Being.
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Author: Dr. Fazlur Rahman
