DARĀMADĪ BE NIẒĀM-E ḤIKMAT-E ṢADRĀ’Ī: HASTĪ-SHINĀSĪ VA JAHĀN-SHINĀSĪ, JILD-E AVVAL [AN INTRODUCTION TO MULLA SADRA’S PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM, VOL. 1: ONTOLOGY AND COSMOLOGY]. By Abd al-Rasul Obudiyyat. Tehran/Qom, Iran: SAMT & Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute. 2006. Pp. 400. Paper. ISBN 9789645300805. 5,900,000 IRR.
Reviewed by Majid Zohdi, MA Student, International Institute for the Islamic Studies
Among the three main schools of Islamic Philosophy, namely Peripatetic Philosophy, the Philosophy of Illumination, and Transcendent Wisdom, Mulla Sadra is the founder of the third. As we can observe in such philosophical systems as Kant and Hegel, newborn schools of philosophy are usually not well organized and need to be arranged; on that account, Hartnack did the job for the former and W. T. Stace did so for the latter. The founders’ ideas, arguments, explanations, objections, and classifications resemble an untidy pile of shots of film scenes that are in crucial need of editing to come into the shape of a movie, and the editors of philosophical systems are not often the founders themselves — so it is with Mulla Sadra as well. Among the major interpretive currents that have outlined Mulla Sadra’s philosophy, Abd al-Rasul Obudiyyat, a pupil of the contemporary philosopher Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, represents the allegedly predominant one. A full professor of philosophy, Obudiyyat has as his main and sole concern to give a first-hand, comprehensive, and at times detailed account of Mulla Sadra’s philosophical system, and the present book is his first — brief but broad — attempt at doing so.
The work is published in three volumes, each dedicated to a specific theme shaping the discussions of Islamic philosophy: Metaphysics in the Broadest Sense (al-ilāhiyyāt bi-al-ma’nā al-a’amm), or Common Notions (al-umūr al-‘āmmah); Theology in the Strict Sense (al-ilāhiyyāt bi-al-ma’nā al-akhaṣṣ); and Philosophical Psychology. The first volume, which is the concern of the present review, delves into al-umūr al-‘āmmah, including such discussions as general principles concerning existence, creation, modals, connective and relational beings, quiddity, simplicity and multiplicity, cause and effect, potentiality and actuality, priority and posteriority, the identity of knowledge, knower, and known, categories, and motion. Following a fairly short preface by the author, the book is arranged under two introductory chapters and two main parts, entitled ontology and cosmology.
The first introductory chapter is dedicated to Mulla Sadra himself. After a glance at Mulla Sadra’s life, the author lists his works in chronological order; contrary to likely expectations, al-Asfār al-Arba’ah was not his last work to start, but it was, of course, the last one to finish, because it had always been an open project to refine. Among other methodological points, Obudiyyat emphasizes that Mulla Sadra always begins with his predecessors’ ideas before advancing his own; one should not, then, get confused by facing apparently inconsistent explanations.
The second introductory chapter is where the author does his most significant work, determining what exactly one meets while facing Islamic Philosophy and, among its branches, Mulla Sadra’s philosophy. According to Obudiyyat, a multitude of critical errors in previous philosophical traditions have stemmed from the conflation of mental representations with extramental reality — a problem of which no trace remains, given the principle of the Primacy of Existence and Ideality of Quiddity. As the author puts it, “The constitutive differentia that separates Transcendent Wisdom from Illuminationist and Peripatetic philosophical schools is putting the primacy of existence and ideality of quiddity forward and placing a special reliance on it for solving numerous philosophical issues; to Transcendent Wisdom, it resembles ‘the thinker’ as the human differentia”.
A more general question remains, however: metaphysics, under which Islamic Philosophy is arranged, is intellectual ontology, and to be philosophical a statement needs to be supported by intellectual proof; yet it is enough to scan Mulla Sadra’s works to find oneself immersed in revealed statements and intuition-based, mystical claims. Is Mulla Sadra’s philosophy, then, really philosophy? Obudiyyat draws on telling quotations from Mulla Sadra to indicate that his answer is yes: when it comes to rational principles, only proofs and demonstrative arguments are valid (al-Asfār, vol. 5, p. 91); the intuitive and revealed propositions Mulla Sadra introduces are not meant to prove ontological statements or displace rational reasoning. Philosophizing, on this account, is the art of relying uniquely on rational propositions when setting arguments and judging claims, which hardly precludes the use of other kinds of propositions for different purposes — a distinction Obudiyyat illustrates with an interesting list of such purposes.
Having thus cleared the ontological and methodological ground, Obudiyyat proceeds to Mulla Sadra’s philosophy proper, and one can observe his deep understanding and mastery of the material through his artful distillation and arrangement of its numerous discussions into this three-volume report. After the principle of the primacy of existence and ideality of quiddity — the most fundamental — he explains that gradation of being, the copulative existence of the effect, and substantial motion are the foundations on which the whole of Mulla Sadra’s philosophy is grounded; ontology and cosmology, accordingly, form the focus of this first volume. I should confess that, despite the classes and studies I had previously taken up, it was by studying this book that I first understood the notion of the primacy of existence and ideality of quiddity: Obudiyyat provides a simple, lucid, and highly accessible account, explaining that to say existence is fundamental is to say, first, that reality and the concrete affairs that fill the world are existence, not quiddity, so that it is existence that has filled the world, and second, that the concept of existence has instances, any reality being an instance of it. The argument is simple — quiddity is unconditioned with respect to individuation, externality, and existence, while these are necessary for reality, so reality, as opposed to nothingness, is not of a quiddity kind — and while more arguments could be introduced, the author confines himself to just one further before moving to discussions that either clarify this principle or follow as its consequences.
As the point of departure for explaining gradation in existence, Obudiyyat articulates how the principle of the primacy of existence results in gradation in existence, not in quiddity. Unlike the Illuminationists, the three well-known kinds of distinction — by whole quiddity, by differentia, and by accidents — are restricted, on this account, to the domain of the mind; and unlike the Peripatetics, there is a fourth kind of distinction, the gradational, which does not reduce to any of the other three. Gradation is exclusively in reality, that is, in existence, with quiddity or concepts playing no role in it: graduated realities are existence, partaking of it more or less. After a brilliant and incisive explanation of the meaning of gradation, Obudiyyat draws out a number of profound discussions that follow from it — including, by way of brief reference, an account of correspondence in epistemology, whereby our knowledge corresponds to its referent because they are two levels of one graduated reality — along with some interesting observations on Platonic Forms.
The next chapter concerns the copulative existence of the effect. Faced with this title, one may initially presume it a marginal discussion that can safely be overlooked; Obudiyyat, likely aware of this assumption, begins by insisting that the issue addressed is among the foremost in Transcendent Wisdom, since it is in this discussion that, by negating multiplicity in existence and situating it within the manifestations of existence, the theory of the Individual Unity of Existence and the Multiplicity of its Manifestations is concluded — the notion in which the intuitive claim of mysticism (the individual unity of existence) reconciles and combines with the evident claim of philosophy (multiplicity). The author’s explanation of the theory and its remarkable implications is a highly engaging read. The book closes with a discussion of substantial motion and the way Mulla Sadra employs it to explain the relation between the fixed and the fluid, and between the originated and the eternal — two controversial, long-standing discussions.
In the book, Obudiyyat presents Mulla Sadra’s philosophy, not his own ideas, so assessment must aim at the accuracy of his report rather than at the ideas themselves; on this measure, I judge the author to have succeeded. His accurate command of Mulla Sadra’s ideas is reflected in his frequent and precise quotations throughout the book, and his introductory explanations of the views of preceding philosophers at the start of each discussion play a crucial role in grasping the issues and theories at stake. Several limitations nonetheless deserve mention. First, Obudiyyat and the current of thought he represents, though strong, are not the only followers of Sadra: Gholamreza Fayazi, with a reading more closely tied to theology, and Yadollah Yazdanpanah, with a more mystical interpretation, offer two notable alternatives, so that a reader wishing a fuller picture of how Mulla Sadra is understood should consult these other currents as well. Second, because Obudiyyat’s task is systematization and faithful presentation rather than independent critique, the book offers little in the way of critical philosophical evaluation of Transcendent Wisdom’s own arguments; readers seeking such critical engagement, rather than an organized report of the system, will need to look elsewhere. Third, the book does not offer a comprehensive account of all issues in Mulla Sadra’s ontology and cosmology, focusing instead, in a rather summary way, on four main principles, so that other works — by this author or others — remain necessary for a comprehensive picture of Transcendent Wisdom. Finally, the book is written in Farsi, which — language technology notwithstanding — still limits direct textual engagement for specialists who wish to consult the original passages themselves; one editorial choice I would have made differently is the use of endnotes rather than footnotes, since footnotes would reduce the distraction of constantly flipping to the back of the volume.
Any philosophical school has its own literature, and one needs to appreciate that literature to gain mastery of that philosophy; Mulla Sadra’s school of thought is no exception, and one must sit at the feet of its great masters, directly or through their books. This book, and its author, are reliable enough to serve that purpose for the first volume of Transcendent Wisdom’s ontology and cosmology.
