Mullā Ṣadrā and the Project of Transcendent Philosophy

Abstract

In this study, we have endeavored to elucidate the 'project' of Mullā Ṣadrā's transcendent philosophy (al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya), an expression that Ṣadrā himself saw fit to describe his philosophical works. The meaning and method of Ṣadrā's transcendent philosophy, which inform his unique philosophical positions, can be better understood when it is placed against the backdrop of discursive philosophy (ḥikma baḥthiyya) of the Muslim peripatetics (al-mashshāʾīn). In explaining the project of transcendent philosophy, Ṣadrā suggests that the mutaʿllih (deiform one) like any other ordinary philosopher builds theoretical models to describe the nature of reality and its diverse phenomena. However, what sets him/her apart from the latter is that he/she believes that through spiritual practices his/her soul can be transformed to the extent that he/ she can attain presential knowledge (al-ʿilm al-ḥuḍūrī) of the reality of being (ḥaqīqat al-wujūd). That is, he/ she can well penetrate the true essences (al-dhawāt) of things insofar as this is a possibility. Life, Intellectual Background, and WorksMullā Ṣadrā is, by any reckoning, one of the most important of all Islamic philosophers, matched only by the likes of Avicenna (d. 1037) and Suhrawardī (d. 1191). A wide-ranging thinker and philosopher, Ṣadrā, left a great body of work spanning a vast array of fields from Qur'anic exegesis (tafsīr), commentary on the traditions (aḥādīth), logic (mantiq), philosophical Sufism (ʿirfān), ethics (akhlāq) to natural philosophy/physics (ṭabīʿiyyāt), theology (kalām), and metaphysics (ilāhiyyāt). His oeuvre comprises over 45 works (some in several volumes) that draw on practically every field of Islamic intellectual learning from its inception until his own day.In the present paper, I will endeavor to elucidate the 'project' of transcendent philosophy (al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya), an expression that Ṣadrā himself saw fit to describe his philosophical works. But before such an undertaking, some clarifications regarding the word 'philosophy' are in order. Although specialists in Islamic intellectual history may be aware of the nuances between the current usage of the term 'philosophy' 1 and the way it was understood by a traditional thinker like Ṣadrā, it would be helpful for the general reader to lay bare the technicalities of such differences. Mullā Ṣadrā lived in a time (16th-17th century Safavid Persia) when the world would still be called what Charles Taylor termed as the 'enchanted' world. 2 That is to say, the philosophizing of Ṣadrā took place in a context where prophecy, supernatural forces, and, more importantly, the notion of 'vertical causality' did not yet lose their philosophic significance. The events in the cosmos or in nature, in this philosophy, were not understood solely in terms of self-explanatory laws of nature, without also taking into account the intervention of a 'higher agency' from beyond the physical realm. Thus it is that most of transcendent philosophy will remain senseless if we do not allow for concepts such as the...