Chapter I: The Metaphysics of Existence
A. Existence
In the development of philosophy in the Islamic East alter Ibn Sina's famous distinction between essence and existence, the question as to which of the two was the primary reality played a capital role. Most philosophers argued on behalf of “essentialism” on the ground that existence, being a common attribute of all beings, is a most general concept and hence has only the reality of a “secondary intelligible(màqul thani)
” to which nothing in reality corresponds. The “Illuminationist” philosopher al-Suhrawardi, in particular, strongly argued against the reality of existence. He argued that if we regard existence as a real attribute of essence, as Ibn Sina appears to do, then essence, in order to have this attribute, must exist prior to existence.
We have pointed out elsewhere that, on this point, Ibn Sina has been largely misunderstood.
Indeed, far from saying that existence is a mere attribute, Ibn Sina declared existence to be the sole nature or reality of God, while in contingent beings he regarded existence to be derived or “borrowed” from God and hence “additional to” their essence but not additional to particular things that exist. Al-Suhrawardi further argued that if existence were a constituent of external reality, then existence will have to exist and this second existence will, in turn, have to exist, and so on ad infinitum. He then enunciated a general principle that every general concept (like existence, unity, necessity, contingency, etc.) whose nature is such that, if a corresponding factor or form is assumed to exist in external reality, this will lead to an infinite regress, must exist only in the mind and not in external reality.
What these arguments really prove is that existence is not an extra factor or attribute in external reality but merely denotes a status of being more or less in Kantian terms. But what al-Suhrawardi actually concluded from them was that only essences are real and that existence is only a general idea, a secondary intelligible to which nothing corresponds in reality. Sadra points out that al-Suhrawardi himself contradicted this principle by describing God as pure and necessary Existence,
and also by characterizing the human self as pure existence - although of a weaker degree of intensity than God.
Sadra strongly rejects the view that nothing in reality corresponds to existence and asserts, on the contrary, that nothing is real except existence. But this existence, which is the sole reality, is never captured by the mind which can only capture essences and general notions. Hence, there is a fundamental difference between the general notion of being or existence and those of essences. Since essences do not exist per se but only arise in the mind from particular forms or modes of existence and hence are mental phenomena, they can, in principle, be fully known by the mind; but the general notion of existence that arises in the mind cannot know or capture the nature of existence, since existence is the objective reality and its transformation into an abstract mental concept necessarily falsities it. In other words, what exists is the uniquely particular, hence it can never be known by the conceptual mind, whereas an essence is by itself a general notion - and does not exist per se - and hence can be known by the mind. No wonder, then, that al-Suhrawardi and others who operated by an abstract notion of existence, declared it to be an empty concept, a secondary intelligible, for it is true that to this abstract concept as such there is nothing that strictly corresponds in reality. But their capital mistake was to think that the reality of existence is just this abstract concept: All notions which arise from [our experience of] the external world and are fully grasped by the mind, their essences are preserved [in the mind] even though the mode of their existence changes [in the mind]. But since the very nature of eistence is that it is outside the mind and everything whose very nature it is to be outside the mind can never possibly come into the mind - or, else, its nature will be completely transformed - hence, existence can never be [conceptually] known by any mind.
It is true, then, that there is an abstract notion of existence arising in the mind out of different existents, but it is equally true that that abstract notion, far from giving us the real nature of existence, falsifies that real nature. Al-Suhrawardi's objection that, if existence were real, it will exist, i.e., will be existent and thus will result in a vicious regress, has no force, since it is not proper to say that existence exists. Existence is that primordial reality thanks to which things exist but it itself cannot be said to exist, according to the common use of the language; just as whiteness is that thanks to which things are white, but whiteness itself cannot be described as white in the common use of the language. It may, of course, be possible to say, as a special usage of terms, that existence is existent par excellence and that whiteness is white par excellence.
If existence were to be treated only as an abstract general notion, then it must be regarded as some sort of an essence, of the order of a genus. We have forbidden this earlier on the ground that existences are unique and no general notion can do justice to the uniqueness of real beings. Further, essences, being static, each instance of an essence is identically the same. No instance of an essence is a unique individual(fard)
but only a case(hissa)
and yields indifferently the same result as any other instance of the same essence: “manness” of A, B, and C is identically the same essence. Existence, on the other hand, has unique individuals(afrad)
, not just cases(hisas)
of existence.
Existence is dynamic, ever unfolding itself in new and higher forms(wujud mun)
, and we shall study this movement of existence in Chapters IV and V of this Part treating respectively of higher causation and movement. It is this dynamism of existence which creates those modes which result in essences in the mind: “Real existences have no names (i.e., properties and descriptions).... While essences have names (and describable properties).”
Reality, then, is the proper place for existence, while mind is the proper home of essences, concepts, and static notions.
Against the view that existence refers to a unique, unanalyzable factor in everything, the objection is urged that, in that case, when existence is asserted of essences as something over and above essences, essences will be invested with being prior to their existence. When faced with this objection, some philosophers assert that existence is a special kind of attribute in that it does not presuppose the existence of an essence, whereas other attributes presuppose it; others accept this absurd conclusion, viz., that essences do have a sort of existence prior to 'real' existence; while still others say that 'existence' really does not mean anything beyond the fact that essences become somehow conjoined with the general notion of “is-ness.” The truth, however, is that existence is existence of an essence, not of something which is then asserted of an essence, as in the case of black, white, round, etc. Existence is simply the status of being real, not an attribute of something which is in its own right already something real.
In view of the fact, however, that existence is claimed to be the sole reality, on the one hand, and essences are also said to exist “for the mind,” the precise relationship between existence and essence is to be determined. Having done this, we can proceed to describe the nature of existence as a dynamic, systematically ambiguous process. According to Sadra, God is Absolute Existence. What the philosophers call Separate Intelligences are, according to him, God's attributes and he identifies them with the Platonic Ideas and what Ibn Arabi calls the “Essences of Contingents” and the “Fixed Ideas(àyan thabita)
.” These have no external existence for Sadra (nor for Ibn 'Arabi) but form the contents of God's mind as His Ideas. Externally, at God's level, therefore, there is nothing but pure existence. This pure existence, which is absolute, manifests itself in different forms, through a process of self-unfoldment, and the resultant beings, which are contingent, are modes of existence(anha al-wujud)
. These modes, although in their basic nature they are only existence, yet are differentiated from absolute existence in that they - being modes or kinds of existence - exhibit certain essential characteristics to the mind. It is in the mind, then, not in external reality that essences arise as a kind of secondary nature of the primordial reality which is existence.
It is just as though the sun, the source of light, is, in a sense, identical with the rays emitted by it, but the rays can give rise to different characteristics, as, for instance, in a prism.
This quality of yielding essences to the mind is a clear sign for Sadra of the attenuation of existence. The more existence is complete, the less of essences it exhibits; hence God has no essence. Essences, therefore, constitute negation of and are dysfunctional to, existence. Existence is positive, definite, determinate, and real; essences are vague, dark, indeterminate, negative, and unreal.
This is why it is more proper to say that, for example, “this is man,” than to say, “man exists.”
Since essences are nothing in themselves, whatever being they possess is due to their being “conjoined” with existence while existences are serf-real, thanks to their being manifestations of and relations to the absolute existence:
They [i.e., essences], so long as they remain unilluminated by the light of existence, are not something to which the mind can point by saying whether they exist or not.... They eternally remain in their native concealment for non-being] and their original state of nonexistence.... They cannot be said to be or not to be - neither do they create, nor are they objects of creation [the objects of creation being the contingent existences, not essences]... [contingent] existences, on the other hand, are pure relations [to absolute existence]; the mind cannot point to them either when they are considered out of relation with their sustaining Creator, since these have no existence independently [of God]. However, in themselves [unlike essences], these [contingent] existences are concrete realities, uninfected by the indeterminacy for essences], pure existences without [the admixture] of essences and simple lights without any darkness.
When we say that essence and existence are “conjoined” or “united,” this talk can be grossly misleading if we imagine that two things or realities come together and are united, since we have seen that essences possess no reality of their own. We should rather think of this “union” in the sense that when absolute existence ceases to be absolute and becomes “modes” of existence,
these modes necessarily give rise to essences, wherein existence is the real, essence, the subjective element. Indeed, God Himself gives rise to essences when He “descends” from His absoluteness and generates attributes as contents of His mind.
His attributes, thus viewed as pure ideas or quasi-essences in His mind (e.g., power, will, knowledge, etc.), have no real existence at all but are purely subjective to Him, but when viewed as His names (e.g., Powerful, Wilier, Knowing), become modes of existence which Sadra identifies with the Ideas of Plato and separate Intelligences of the Muslim Peripatetics. Thus, in its downward movement, when existence becomes further and further diversified into modes, these modal existences generate diverse essences.
The view that existence itself creates essences sets Sadra apart from Muslim Peripatetics who believe that a concrete existent is a composite of essence and existence, each of them having a separate reality in its own right, and from al-Suhrawardi and his followers, who believe that essence is the reality while existence is a mere abstraction. Sadra's view further clarifies and corroborates the doctrine, held also by Aristotle and the Peripatetics, that existence is not a genus. Aristotle had argued that existence cannot be a genus since genus and differentia each can be described as something which “is,” and that “is-ness” comprehends everything, whether conceptual or real.
It is obvious that this argument confuses between positive existence and the general “is-ness” which Sadra and al-Suhrawardi would call an abstraction. For Sadra, existence cannot be a genus or a differentia, since it is existence that creates all essence, and whatever abstract “is-ness” belongs to essences, it does not belong to them per se - since in themselves essences neither “are'' nor “are not” - but because their being is derivative from real existence. In other words, they are invested with this “is-ness” when they become objects of a mind.
B. Controversy with the “Essentialists”
Ibn Sina had distinguished between essence and existence in reality and had declared existence to be some sort of an accident of the essence, even though it is not an accident of a thing. In the controversy after him in the Islamic East, most philosophers thought essence to be the reality and existence a mere subjective abstraction. As we have said earlier, al-Suhrawardi is the most relentless critic of the doctrine of the reality of existence and the pioneer of the doctrine that essence is the sole reality and existence a mental abstraction.
It is al-Suhrawardi, therefore, whom Sadra makes the primary target of his criticism on this point, and whose arguments for the reality of essence he seeks to refute, one by one.
Al-Suhrawardi had urged in his K. al-Talwihat that if existence were to be regarded as a real attribute of essence, then, if essence were to exist after existence was united to it, existence would then have existed per se and independently of essence; or if essence were to exist together with existence, then essence would exist together with existence, and not through existence and, therefore, would acquire this second existence. It is not difficult for Sadra to refute this argument. Far from essence being something positive which acquires existence, essence per se is nothing positive at all. Indeed, in external reality, essence is simply not there. What is there is a mode of existence.
When this mode of existence is presented to the mind, it is the mind that abstracts an essence from it, while existence escapes it, unless it develops a proper intuition for it. It is the mind, then, which comes to regard essence to be the reality and existence as a mere accident. This is because the basis of all mental judgments is essence, not existence. In reality, however, it may be far nearer the truth to say that essence is an accident of existence, although even this is not proper to say, since in reality existence is the sole original reality while essence arises from it as something secondary for the mind. There are not two things or factors in reality co-ordinate with each other, viz., existence and essence, but only existence.
When, therefore, the mind (a) differentiates between essence and existence and (b) declares the former to be real, it necessarily falsities reality.
Similarly, al-Suhrawardi's worry that existence cannot be related to a nonexistent essence, nor to an essence which is neither existent nor non-existent since in the latter case both sides of the contradiction will be eliminated, is met by Sadra's statement that elimination of opposites is not impossible at certain levels of reality. Essence per se is neutral both to existence and nonexistence, since per se an essence is simply what it is - e.g., horse is horse, man is man - and to exist or not to exist is no part of it. But when we regard essence as not per se but in reality, then essence has no separate reality from existence, since its very being is the being of existence itself. Existence, therefore, cannot be regarded as a quality of essence in reality, since 'quality' presupposes already something existent.
Thirdly, the illuminationist philosopher argues that since in no contingent being is existence part of its essence - for we can conceive an essence but we still do not know if it exists - existence is additional to its essence. But we can go on asking the same question about existence, i.e., even after conceiving its existence we still do not know if it really exists. Sadra says that this objection is valid against those who regard existence as separate from essence, but not against his thesis which posits existence as the sole reality. This sole reality cannot be conceived but can only be intuited directly. Al-Suhrawardi's argument has, therefore, no force either against the Muslim Peripatetics - when their doctrine is re-stated as existence being the sole reality - or for al-Suhrawardi's contention that existence is unreal.
Fourthly, again, al-Suhrawardi seeks to deduce a vicious regress from the distinction between essence and existence: essence and existence will then be related to each other. This relation will have an existence and this existence, in turn, will once again be related to the relation, and so on ad infinitum. Sadra's answer is that since the distinction exists only in the mind, the relation and the infinite regress generated by it also exist only in the mind and this mental regress can be terminated by the mind by ceasing its higher-order operations, as is the case with all forms of mental regress.
The whole misconception of al-Suhrawardi arises out of considering existence as a general concept of the same nature as an essence. When he considers the being of existence in external reality and rejects it, it is thanks to the same misconception. But “existence” as an abstract noun, i.e., as “being existent,” is a mental abstraction and as such has no real existence, while existence as a unique, unanalyzable fact is the concrete reality which never comes into the mind, as we have recurrently said. It is the same as “light,” which as a general abstraction - i.e., in meaning “being illumined'' - has no share of existence in the external world, but “light” as a fact is what exists externally. Just as light - in the second sense - exists per se and makes other things visible by illuminating them, so does existence exist per se and makes all essences exist accidentally. Existence is, therefore, per se light; essences per se are darkness.
Existence, as an abstraction, is related to real existence in the same way as “humanity”, as a general concept, is related to a real man, while existence, as an abstraction, is related to essence in the same way as “humanity” is related to “a being capable of laughter.”
“The cause of effects and effects of the cause are nothing but real existents.”
Neither existence as a concept nor any other essence shares this reality. Existence is not something which has reality; existence is reality itself.
People think of existence as that which has priority over all concepts, and is the condition of all meaningful attribution, and cannot become nonexistent. How can they say, in the same breath, that existence is no more than an intellectual abstraction?
Shall the line between being and non-being, between reality and unreality, disappear?
Sadra's attempts, however, to support his thesis - that existence is the sole reality and that existence-essence dualism arises only in the mind - with quotations from Ibn Sina are not at all successful. It was Ibn Sina, in fact, who created the theory of dualism between essence and existence in reality, a theory which was rejected by Ibn Rushd but adopted in the West by Aquinas and in the East by a host of philosophers and theologians. Quotations from Ibn Sina may, therefore, be brought against later Muslim essentialists who did not consider existence to be real, for example al-Suhrawardi and others, but they certainly cannot be adduced to prove Sadra's thesis that there is no essence-existence dualism in reality. For Ibn Sina, essences are real, not just mental, and he regards everything else thenceforward to be a real composite of essence and existence. This is, indeed, so clear from any passage that Sadra quotes that one is astonished why a man of Sadra's intellectual caliber failed to see its meaning. If this shows anything, it shows Sadra's preoccupation with his own view to a point where he could not read Ibn Sina with full objectivity. Here is an example of a quotation from Ibn Sina by Sadra : “That whose existence becomes necessary through another,” says Ibn Sina, “be it an eternal being, cannot have a simple nature(haqiqa)
, for that which it possesses per se is different from that which it possesses through the other. Its being, therefore, in real existence, is a composite of both factors.”
But Sadra goes on to conclude from this evidence: “No one disputes at all that the distinction between existence and essence occurs only in the mind and not in actual reality!”
His commentator, al-Sabzawari, naturally points out that this is not consistent with Sadra's own criticism of Muslim Peripatetics, whom he accuses of holding the existence-essence dualism in reality.
C. Systematic Ambiguity (Tashkik ) of Existence
The classical tradition of Aristotelian logic had distinguished between two types of universal, one univocally applicable(kulli mutawati')
and the other equivocally or ambiguously applicable(kulli mushakkak.)
An example of the first type is “man,” which is univocally applicable to all humans, while an example of the second type is “soul,” which is applicable to earthly souls and heavenly souls, with essential differences. Later Muslim Peripatetics, however, believe that there are no differences within a single essence and the differences are only in particular existences of an essence. Thus, when black color intensifies in a body, for example, there is no difference in general ''blackness(al-sawad)
” but instances of blackness(al-aswad)
differ from each other because, when black color intensifies, a new species of black arises and the previous black goes out of existence.
In his works, al-Suhrawardi had criticized this view at length and contended that a single specific essence may have a range of intensity and need not be replaced by another specific essence, while a qualitative intensification takes place. Thus, when black color intensifies, not only does “blackness” but also “black” remain the same, yet a qualitative increase has taken place. Similarly, “animal” remains the same yet animality can increase or decrease. In other words, all essences are capable of “more or less” or ''increase and decrease”: an animal can be more of an animal than another. and a man more of a man than another. Indeed, for al-Suhrawardi, the category of “more or less” is the most basic and ultimately the only category applicable to the range of reality:
The animalness of man, for example, is more perfect than the animalness of a mosquito. One cannot deny that the one is more perfect than the other merely on the ground that in conventional language one cannot say, 'the animalness of this is greater than that of the other.'
The opponents' statement that one cannot say 'This is more perfect in point of essence than the other' is based on imprecisions in the conventional language.
Sadra has taken over this doctrine of “more perfect and less perfect” as the basis of his philosophy of existence. But in Sadra this principle undergoes two fundamental changes. The first is that this principle, called tashkik, is applied not to essence but primarily to existence - since existence is the only original reality - and only derivatively to essences. We have seen that while all existence is unique, essences are characterized by universality in the mind.
Hence, whereas essences are univocal, existence is equivocal or ambiguous(mutashakkik.)
When something is characterized by such ambiguity, it, by virtue of being a principle of identity acts as the principle of difference - not that it is a principle of identity in one sense or respect and a principle of difference in another sense or respect(ma bihi'l ittifaq huwa 'ain ma bihi'l ikhtilaf)
.
Only existence is such a principle, for it is the nature of existence and existence alone to create identity-in-difference:
Now that you are convinced that existence is one single reality which has no genus and no differentia and it is identically the same in all things and its self-manifesting instances do not differ in their very nature, nor do they differ through additional instantiating factors(huwiyat)
- rather, these instantiating factors are identical with their very nature... you must conclude, therefore, that these existential instances (which are identical in nature) are (at the same time and by virtue of the same nature) different from one another in terms of priority and posteriority, perfection and imperfection, strength and weakness.
The second all-important point of difference with al-Suhrawardi is that existence is not only ambiguous, it is systematically ambiguous.
This is because existence is not static but in perpetual movement. This movement is from the more general(àmm)
, the more indeterminate(mubham,)
and the more diffuse levels of being to the more concrete(khass)
, determinate, and integrated or “simple” forms of existence. Every prior form of existence behaves like genus or matter and is swallowed up into the concreteness of the posterior form which behaves like differentia or form. This movement from the less perfect to the more perfect is, further, uni-directional and irreversible, for existence never moves backwards. We shall see later in the discussion of eschatology in Part III that Sadra also rejects the reincarnation of human souls in animals on the basis of this theory.
We have said above that essences are dysfunctionally related to existence: the more a thing exhibits by way of essence, the less of existence it has. At the lowest rung of the scale of existence is primary matter which, in fact, does not exist but is merely a concept, i.e., an essence, since it is defined as “potentiality of existence.” The highest point in this scale is God, who is absolute existence and hence has no essence and is not amenable to conceptual thought at all.
Existence is not structured within this scale like static grades or levels of being, as al-Suhrawardi believed, but is actually moving from the lowest point towards the highest. The driving force of this universal movement is 'ishq, or cosmic love, which impels everything towards a more concrete form and, as we shall note in Sadra's account of eschatology, the philosopher believes that each of the intellectually and spiritually perfected members of the human species will become a species unto himself in the hereafter. The affinity of this doctrine of movement to Muhammad Iqbal's view of the dynamic process of reality resulting in the evolution of a more concrete and spiritual self-hood for man is obvious enough.
Since existence is the object of universal desire, it follows that existence is good and absolute existence is absolute good. This also shows that existence is real and not a mere concept, since no one desires to be a mental concept or a secondary intelligible.
Also, absolute existence has no opposite, nor peer, because opposites and peers are subsumable under a genus, and existence has no genus. Evil, therefore, is never absolute, but only relative, partial, and negative, and arises out of partial existence, which is subject to essences which are the source of evil both because they are partial and because they are infected with absolute contingency and, as such, suffer from the darkness of negation.
The proposition that existence is systematically ambiguous means: (1) that, in a sense, existence in all things is basically the same; otherwise, if there were utter difference between things in point of existence, the term “existence” would not have the same meaning at all and there would not be ambiguity or analogy but utter difference; (2) that existence, by being the same, yet creates fundamental differences which render every existent unique: existents are not like onions, which can be entirely peeled off without a residue, but rather like “family faces” which have something basic in common yet each is unique; and (3) that, thanks to substantive movement in existence (to be studied in Chapter V of this Part), all the lower forms of existence are contained in and transcended by higher forms. Sadra also reiterates in his discussion of essence that the higher form of contingent existence contains all the lower forms in itself in a simple manner. The Perfect Man, therefore, both contains and sustains all the universe. But for him, the world would go to pieces.
This is Sadra's formulation - under Ibn 'Arabi's influence - of the famous doctrine of the Sufis that the Perfect Man is the Pole(qutb)
of the universe and that, but for him, the universe would be destroyed. The higher, then, emerges from the lower but, in turn, sustains the latter and becomes the cause of its continual existence. At the point of the emergence of the Perfect Man, the contingent realm enters the divine. The Perfect Man becomes analogous to or part of the Transcendental Intelligences which are nothing else than parts of godhead. This brings us to the very difficult question of the relationship of the Necessary and the Contingent in Sadra.
D. Tension between Monism and Pluralism
Sadra tells us that he had not always held the view that existence is the primordial reality, that in his earlier philosophic career he had strongly advocated essentialism, and that it was only later that the truth of existentialism dawned upon him.
We also learn from his scanty biography that Sadra had been an advocate of existential monism, for which he was persecuted by orthodox theologians, but that later he grew out of it.
It must be concluded, then, that the doctrine of the systematic ambiguity of existence was the result of Sadra's mature thought, i.e., the view that although existence is, in a sense, one single reality, yet in each case it is basically different and sui generis as well.
Yet there is clearly discernible a real tension in Sadra's thought between a monistic trend where contingents literally vanish into nothingness in the face of God,
who alone is identified with reality and existence, and between the doctrine of the systematic ambiguity of existence, where every contingent being has a unique reality of its own which cannot be reduced to anything else. An example of the first trend is in a verse he quotes: “Everything in the world (except God) is (of the order of) imagination or a fancy or a reflection in a mirror or a mere shadow.”
An extreme and more explicit statement is the following: “It must be borne in mind that our affirmation of different levels of multiple existences and the concessions we make - in the interests of pedagogy - concerning the diversity and multiplicity of existence do not contravene what we really wish to prove, God willing, viz., that both existence and the existent are but one and unitary.”
Indeed, this strain of thought that God is the only Reality and all else is mere appearance is so superabundantly displayed in Sadra's writings that it becomes difficult not to regard it as a most fundamental one, and we are constantly reminded that “in the Abode of Existence, there is no other inhabitant save God.”
This line of thought strongly suggests that one can perfectly analyze any contingent being into essence and existence, shear it of all essence, and simply give the existence back to where it ideally belongs. Sadra quotes two passages from Ibn Sina's Tàliqat where Ibn Sina insists that the necessity of the Necessary Existent (God) is constitutive of that existent, while the contingency of the contingent and its dependence upon the Necessary Being is equally constitutive of it, so that no interchange or mutation can occur between the two since the two have a separate, fixed, nature. Yet, in the teeth of these passages, our philosopher comments upon them, “Any intelligent person can intuitively perceive therefrom what we intend to prove... viz., that all contingent beings and relational entities are mere appearances and modes of the Necessary Existence.... They have no existence-in-themselves.... Not that these possess realities of their own which then come to be related to another [i.e., God] with a relationship of dependence, but in the sense that their beings consist in pure poverty and dependence; they have no reality of their own except their being relations (of dependence) to a single Reality. Reality, therefore, is only One, there is nothing else besides “
One will, indeed, need an intuition like Sadra's to perceive in Ibn Sina's statements the view that contingents are not things related to God by a dependence relationship but are mere relations! Even a ray of light or a reflection or a shadow has a reality of its own. What Sadra's dicta amount to, from this point of view, then, is that God alone is real as Reality, while the contingent is real only as appearance. The difficulty we confront then is: how to square this Reality-Appearance thesis with that of the systematic ambiguity of existence?
But that is not the whole story, for, indeed, the real story of existence is brought out only by Sadra's doctrine of the systematic ambiguity of existence. According to this doctrine, existence itself is many, not one, and this multiplicity is a consequence of the very nature of the principle of existence, which, by its very virtue of being the principle of identity and sameness, is the principle of multiplicity and difference. Hence it is called the principle of tashkik and it is the only ultimate principle of tashkik, according to Sadra. Existence, then, inherently manifests itself in existents ordered according to existential priority and posteriority and in terms of intensity and diminution of existence. Since these manifestations are a consequence of the very nature of existence itself and are not due to any extrinsic factor, each and every existent is unique and irreducible. It is, therefore, impossible that a contingent be analyzable into two constituents: an essence and an existence, and the latter be simply “given back” to God, the Primordial and Original Existence. Indeed, on this theory, all existents, whether Necessary or Contingent, are original and primordial, since each one of them is unique and irreducible. The fundamental difference between God and the contingent existents is that God is pure, undiluted Existence without any admixture of essence, while in contingents this existence is diluted and suffers diminution in a graded scale and, in proportion to the diminution of their existence, they display or manifest essences. This is the meaning of Sadra's repeated statements that essences are inversely related and dysfunctional to existence. On the principle of tashkik, therefore, there is no question of existence becoming shorn of essence and being regarded as God or part of God.
Indeed, on the basis of the principle of tashkik, Sadra explicitly rejects existential monism. He criticizes those Sufi thinkers who hold that “existence is represented in only one individual, God, and that existence of essences which are [according to them] positive realities, means their coming into a relationship with the Necessary Existence.... Thus, existence for them is one single individual entity, while 'existent' is a universal having multiple [relational] instances.”
Sadra rejects this view, saying that it is impossible that God's being itself should form the existence of contingents - substances or accidents. This is because, in the case of many existents, whose essence is identical (like man, for example), there will remain no distinction at all between them, should their existence also be identically the same, viz., the individual being of God. Indeed, this very difficulty proves that existence can never be identically the same in any two existents whether they stand under the same essence or not.
The same rejection of monism results from Sadra's famous principle, “That which is of simple nature is everything(basit al-haqiqa hull al-ashya')
,” of which he deems himself to be the first formulator in Islam.
God, being absolutely simple, is all existence. Sadra's commentator, al-Sabzawari, rightly points out that this principle does not mean unity in diversity, as it has been generally misunderstood, but means diversity in unity. That is to say, this principle does not yield the possibility of predicating everything of God but, on the contrary, yields the denial of that possibility: the absoluteness of God means that nothing relative or conditioned can be attributed to Him. We shall now see what “absolute” and “conditioned” mean in this context. If we conceive a species in terms of its definitional notions alone, e.g., plant as a “growing body,” then we can add more specific definitional notions or differentiae to it and obtain the definition of another species. For example, by adding “capable of perception and locomotion'' to “growing body,” we can get the definition of animal. In such cases, we can always predicate the more general definitional notions of the species resulting from the addition of these differentiae. Thus we can predicate “growing body” of animal. But if we regard “growing body” not just as a definitional notion but as a concrete, existential species, i.e., plant, then we cannot predicate “plant” of “animal.” Now, whereas philosophers think of “absolute” and “conditioned” primarily in notional terms alone, Sufis mean by them concrete realities. When they say God is absolute, they mean He is the absolutely concrete reality in the sense that nothing else concrete, being partial, can be predicated of Him: one may not say, e.g., that God is man or angel or anything else. This is because the absolute is beyond all that is conditioned. What the Sufis call “absolute” is thus equivalent to what the philosophers term “simple.” God, then, being absolutely simple, cannot be identical with anything that is composite. Since a composite is a composite because it tolerates the ascription both of affirmative and negative attributes, God only has positive attributes, i.e., only non-being is negated of Him.
The relative contingent has thus a reality of its own, its proper being, however imperfect it be and however invisible it might become under the Titanic shadow of the Absolute. But this is a very different language from the one also often used by Sadra to describe the contingent in its relation to the Absolute, viz., that it is a mere relation, not something related, a mere manifestation, not something manifested. The contingent is not related to God as an accident to a substance, nor yet as a conventional predicate to its subject, for each of them is supposed to possess a being of its own, however weak. The contingent has no being at all which could be related to God, and our philosopher severely takes Jalal al-Din al-Dawwani (whom he is ever prone to attack, even going out of his way!) to task for describing the God-world relationship in terms of the relationship of a body to black color or that of a piece of cotton to cloth, for black cannot exist without body and cloth is inconceivable without cotton. Sadra's attack is launched on the ground that black and cloth have the status of at least accidental being, which the world does not possess.
But when we say that it is impossible for the contingent to be analyzed artificially into essence and existence and the latter to be shorn of the former, we must not assume that contingent existence is fixed and static. For the principle of intrinsic movement of being upward(haraka fi'ljawhar)
is the twin grand theme of Sadra's thought besides tashkik. Indeed,
he often presents the principle of movement as a manifestation of tashkik, since physical nature, by constantly moving towards higher forms of existence, gives rise to and assumes these higher forms. If the utter diminution of being into prime matter is a metaphysical mystery of pre-eternity, for whose solution we have little clue,
the upward surge of reality towards ever higher forms of being is an attestable phenomenon of temporal existence. Indeed, it is this perpetual transformation of the lower into higher modes of existence which, for Sadra, validates the principle of tashkik. This is what makes the field of existence a spatio-temporal continuum which is the subject of our discussion of Sadra's concept of movement. As the ultimate consequence of this dynamic process, arises the Perfect Man(al-insan al-kamil)
, where the Contingent and the Eternal meet, and although one may not say that the contingent sheds its contingency altogether and becomes God, one may say that it becomes identical with God's Attributes, the Transcendental Intelligences of the philosophers.
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Author: Dr. Fazlur Rahman
