The Transcendent Method

The overall objective of this paper is to reconstruct the outline of a method tacitly employed by Sadr al-Dīn Muhammed Shīrāzī, entitled Sadrà (b.1640, Shiraz)[1] in building up his doctrine of the illuminative existentialism. Historically speaking, this is rooted in Avicenna’s idea of hikmat al-mashriqyyín;[2] Avicenna has hinted that he whishes to establish a philosophy to be purely orientalized in principle. His commentators understand this as a clue to a philosophy based on the ancient Persian wisdom. Because of his death, he could not elaborate such a philosophy however. This task fulfilled later by another Persian philosopher Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī [myr. 1191],[3] who established a new philosophical system on the notion of Illumination and Light.[4]

Thus rooted, Sadrā’s Transcendent Philosophy – a name that is the title of his major book The Transcendent Philosophy through the Four Intellectual Journeys of the Self [5] – followed the doctrine of sayr wa suluk that is widely developed through the illuminative literature to put together the elements of the Transcendent Philosophy through “four journeys of the self”. The phrase “four journeys of the self” that is brought in the title of his book, is symbolically employed here to depict an intellectual process whereby the self gains the true knowledge following his existential transformation.[6] Interpreting this symbolism, we would try here to “extract”[7] a descriptive illustration of the Transcendent method that is somehow often hidden from the eyes of investigators and Orientalists.

The Transcendent Philosophy has different philosophical, theological and mystical aims. As for these aims the Transcendent school has chosen a synthetic method. This is so, because for this school, philosophy, as investigating and interpreting every kind of phenomena, natural, inward human, and metaphysical, seeks the profound foundations of these phenomena. Therefore, as can be inferred from the Transcendent tradition as a whole, philosophy should conduct its search by having at its disposal all methods of obtaining knowledge. This philosophical activity implies the presence of a problem or a variety of problems in need of a solution; and since a method is “a device or a procedure, to solve a problem or answer a question”,[8] and since problems or questions vary in kind, the methods for solving them will also vary.

Thus, the multiplicity of problems confronting man’s intellect demanded the use of a multiplicity of methods. Transcendent school implies that man must have been greatly impressed by the empirical scientific approach; this is why he commences his philosophic investigation by it and continued its application until the disclosure of the Being is achieved. This, however, does not force him to a slavish adherence to the scientific approach nor to give up the results of other methods.

The free manner in which the Transcendent Philosophy utilizes these methods compels us to believe that this school does not consider that philosophy has only one distinct method of its own. On this point the Transcendent Philosophy completely agrees with M. Farber who writes in this respect:

[The plurality of methods] signifies that no one type of procedure is to be regarded as the correct method exclusively... An unlimited number of methods restricted at a given time only by human ingenuity and the extent of knowledge, is the response to an unlimited number of types of problem. The principle of the co-operation of methods applies, whether the methods be objectivistic or subjectivistic, ‘longitudinal’ [historical or evolutionary] or ‘cross-sectional’ [conceptual and formal].[9]

Such is the Transcendent point of view as well; especially when the world ‘historical’ in Farber’s text can be replaced by ‘existential’.

Let us now read this in the context of the Transcendent terminology: The Transcendent literature which covers the meditative as well as the speculative aspects of the Transcendent school is full of dissertations and epistles discussing the method to achieve the truth. A general title for such a methodological discussions is in their words sayr wa suluk. There are two interrelated kind of sayr wa suluk in general: Àfāqī which belongs to the horizon of Being, and anfusī which is vertically directed toward the purest point (or the source) of Being. These two kinds of sayr wa suluk realized for a Truth-seeker (tàlib al-haqq) in four stages of an existential experience, which indicates four ek-stasis of the self to achieve the unitary consciousness.[10] Generally considering, however, we may summarize their wide discussions on these stages by philosophically depicting them in the following form:

c) Reduction from the knowing self to the self as unitary consciousness (al-nafs 'ayn al-m'arifatih);

d) Reduction of the unitary consciousness to Being which implies a new return to the things (the phenomenal world) through Being itself, with a different outlook; considering neither their appearance (as Phenomenalism says) nor their essence (as Phenomenology says); rather, their reality as the emanative entities.

The reductions (a) and (b) belong, in their terminology, to the horizontal lines in the structure of Being; and we can classify them as the eidetic reduction (in Husserlian sense) because they belong to essences, to the eidetic field. The reductions (c) and (d), on the other hand, belong to the vertical line in the structure of Being and we can classify them as the ontetic[11] reduction because they concern only with the pure being. This eidetic-ontetic distinction we suggested is based on Sadrian special understanding of essence-existence distinction of which we speak later. In the eidetic reduction, in which we are reflectively seek for the essences and their interrelations as they appear in our reflective constituting consciousness, the Transcendent school employs a plurality of methods: induction, deduction and other logical methods, while in the ontetic reduction, in which there is no reflection but a pure presence in the mythical symphony of Being, it employs method of the ontetic touch and contact.

Such the Transcendent Philosophy, methodologically speaking, has intended to bestow objectivity, inevitableness, freedom from presuppositions, and a radical beginning for its philosophy. By such a method, and so far as the Transcendent epistemology of presence is concerned, the Transcendent school suggests a radical beginning in which the Truth-seeker (tālib al-haqq) returns to freshly know himself, world and God and the whole system of Being anew. Such a starting implies to pass from appearances or phenomena (zawàhir) to their real truth. However their real truth is conceptually constituted as essences through our mind. This is because we are remained on the horizontal line of Being, that is, in the eidetic field in which we reflectively journey (al-sayr al-afàqí). Though this is one dimension of Being constituted as essences for us, one can not claim that he reached the reality in this level, that is by reducing the appearances to their essences; simply because their realities, Sadrà argue, equal their beings (not their essence) and this is crucial for him to reduce essence to existence as we will see later in this paper: Meanwhile, we are on the vertical lines of Being, that is, in the ontetic field in which we are non-reflectively immensely melted and existentially experience ourselves, the beings and God – in one world Being. This brief description of the Transcendent method suggests us a triple discussion on it: We start with the ideal of a radical beginning, and then continue with the eidetic reduction in which the logical and reflective rules and methods employed, and end with the ontetic reduction by which the existential aspects of Sadrian discussion are revealed. On this, then, we would now describe the Transcendent idea of a radical beginning.

As hinted above, the Transcendent method starts with an ideal for a beginning-less commence. This can easily be seen in its emphasis on tawbah meaning return as suggested by the illuminative doctrine of tahdhíb al-nafs meaning purification of the self. This means for them to be released from what is done as yet; and to start again with a hope to achieve the truth. To this Sadrà points when writing: “Oh, my friend! Begin [to philosophize]... first of all by purifying yourself.”[12]

The Transcendent philosophy suggests that in order to catch the truth and to identify with being, the Truth-seeker (tàlib al-haqq) should practically purify himself from what has occupied him through the personal, environmental and social history.[13] The mystical aspect of the Transcendent epistemology is hidden in this point, because there are systematic rules and norms for practice to achieve the ultimate truth and to identify with Being. The first step is to give up all educated and learned issues, to purify from what occupied the self, to abandon the past and the future and to pick up the present moment. We would be, in this mystical outlook, alone on our existential site to have a new look. Un-molded by human conventions or by the social values, manner and philosophical system of long-lasting history, we would then feel to be free of all prejudice, misconceptions, and assumptions characteristics of the socially born humans. This implies to disembody the human personality of the entire cultural, social, and political complex of traditional society. Such advises us the Transcendent school to start from the very beginnings and fundamentals.

This doctrine philosophically indicates for Sadrà, a radical beginning and a pre-supposed less commence. This is so because this doctrine has direct bearing on the method of philosophizing, the beginning of a fresh outlook on philosophical problems, and the explanation of man’s encounter with his environment. Let us read these words here from Sadrà:

No body can catch it [the truth] except those who have been alone, isolated from the others, variously mediating, and absolutely withdrawn from their ordinarily culture, social customs, habits and worldly behaviors and concerns, suspending the traditional believes and the public morals in full.[14]

He seriously avoids us to “take the traditionally accepted thoughts, because” he argues “such taking is imitation and formal, keeping the way to the truth closed up.”[15]

By such a removing man from the social situation, Sadrà had done what Descartes, Hume and Husserl. Of course, resemblance to these thinkers should not be over-stretched; for to render the Transcendent Philosophy in modern garb more than its thought really permits leads to a methodological blunder. When done within legitimate limits, however, a comparison between this school and certain moderns would show that what some consider to be the revolutionary attempts of the latter are not entirely new, and that previous masters were aware of the importance of such attempts though in outline and not in detail or conscious elaboration.

Moreover, we may see that the Transcendent school invokes a raising sense of doubt (maqām al-hayrah) which is just prior or along with “return” (tawbah). This doubt (hayrah) can be encountered here to complete the ideal of beginning-less. For this school this doubt implies to attempt a hypothetical destruction of the surrounding world of tradition and early education. It was shattering the mold that captures the very fabric of the self at the moment of birth and fashions it according to the patterns of the past and the present. In this, the Transcendent school was trying to give a fresh and radical beginning to its philosophy. By “radical” we mean what Husserl meant by the term, namely, the ideal of emancipation from all presuppositions. This means beginning with the ambitious task of knowing things without any a priori adoption of epistemological, metaphysical, ontological, or value principles.

Man, the truth-seeker (tàlib al-haqq), is there on his existential site with no instruments except the givenness of his primeval impulses and his curious mind heading for truth. By allowing his existential capacities to unfold, excluding any intervention from without, and by exploring the freshness of what to be a puzzling world with puzzling phenomena, the Transcendent school is proclaiming to philosophers the Husserlian maxim before Husserl: “back to the things themselves,” see, perceive, observe and describe phenomena afresh – a maxim which ultimately sounds for the Transcendent Philosophy a return to their beings not (as Husserl did) to their essences; it is urging them to overthrow the artificial and sophisticated barrier of schemes and values between man and the “life world” developed by humanity throughout the ages. The “things in themselves” are “beings” with which we are in touch. In this sense at the beginning everybody is a radical and naive empiricist. In his everyday life, he is in touch with the environing world as it appeared to him or as he encountered it in immediate experience. This is the Husserlian world, the “life world”, the ordinary world in which one lives, works, and plays. Like Husserl, the Transcendent school is judging things in their own terms as experienced. From beginning of consciousness of facts until cognizance of Being, the Transcendent method partly is a descriptive one, that is phenomenological; namely, before theorizing advises us to experience.

The Transcendent school suspends all preconceived commitments and places the entire world of conventions and traditions in abeyance. Here again this school’s ideal of freedom from presuppositions is like Descartes’, Hume’s, and Husserl’s. For the Transcendent school as for these thinkers, this ideal is a preparatory stage to examine all beliefs and noetic processes for evidence, validity, and consequences. The examination of these is accomplished by breaking away from them and, thus, dislodging them temporarily in order to find out whether philosophy in its fresh start from “thing” in experience to reach the indubitable truth, confirms or disconfirms these beliefs. Moreover, through this radical method, this school pushes its search and inquiry to its extreme consequences. Sadrà, for example,[16] depicts our “blank” and receptive mind as constituting and perfecting itself, and struggling to obtain far‑reaching conclusions entirely on its own. Our progressive ascension, Sadrà holds, has a tint of inevitableness and necessity. Seemingly without any preconceived notions we achieve cognizance of causality, God, eternity of the world, and mysticism. It appears as though any mind will reach the same truths if it took as its point of departure the unsophisticated given of experience and followed the canons of consistency. Thus, Alfred North Whitehead’s well-known dictum that in philosophy there is no method that surpasses common sense and real insight would be considered almost true by the Transcendent school.

Such an approach to begin places the Transcendent school among the early pioneers whose ideal was the establishment of philosophical propositions on the radical method of the freedom from presuppositions. Had this school been philosophically more prolific and had it utilized such a method to its fullest, we would have been in a better position to pronounce more emphatic and elaborate assertions concerning this important and valid method of its.[17] Thus, as we have partly seen so far and as we shall still find out in this section, behind the new words and expressions of Descartes, Hume and Husserl to give a radical start for philosophy, stands the old philosophical and methodological practice of the Transcendent school. In comparison with the ancients, this method seems to be entirely novel and was not a familiar item in the household of ancient philosophy.

Plato, for instance, could not even conceive of philosophy or philosophers operating outside the social order. Philosophizing must begin with the already presupposed concepts and values available in the polis; given ideas can be changed and molded to establish a better life in the polis and to improve the moral life of the individual. However, such concepts as justice, courage, and virtue were taken for granted by Plato, although he examined their lexical meanings and formulated (stipulated) his own. Aristotle, on the other hand, although was a ruthless examiner of the beliefs of his predecessors and an empiricist rationalist in his approach to philosophical problems, did not conceive of the method of suspension of the traditional world of conventions and values and of the “natural view of the world”.

From a methodological point of view, the resemblance between the Transcendent school, Descartes, Hume, and Husserl perhaps that is not so much in detailed outlook as it is in the insistence of these authors upon an ideal of a radical beginning. We are emphasizing this point again in order to avoid any possible misunderstanding of our comparative remarks. Our intention is not to identify the ideas of the three modern European thinkers and the Transcendent school, but to show that it was aware and had attempted to apply “radicalism” in beginning its philosophy, a view that has been correctly and emphatically endorsed by these moderns.

The Transcendent school was as acutely aware of the impossibility of reversing or annulling the cultural achievements and beliefs of humanity by such a method, as were Descartes, Hume, and Husserl; but it was, as they were, more than certain that this method furnishes man with a new perspective in his outlook on things. The suspension of any kind of belief by these writers was only theoretical, in order to clear the way for their philosophizing from any preconceived prejudice. Mystical (practical) aspect of the Transcendent Philosophy furnishes such a possibility.[18]

It may be remembered that Hume disregarded all beliefs and metaphysical assertions and “bracketed” all the assumptions of scientific procedure, e.g., causality, placing in abeyance the epistemological investigations of former philosophers and the sophisticated framework of the world of tradition. He started from the very fundamentals and questioned all habits of the mind and of the conceptions of the phenomenal world. His ideal was an assumption‑free description of appearances or impressions. Through his rigorous descriptive method, he found out that there is no reason or guarantee in experience for the necessary connections between ideas. Demonstrations depend on the relations of ideas, and prove only what is conceivable or inconceivable and not what in fact the case is. Apart from relations of ideas, all that we perceive and all we can demonstrate is the existence of our perceptions. There is no reason to suppose that our impressions are supported by a material world, or a subjective self.[19] Thus, Hume’s attempt at a presuppositionless beginning led him to a universal skepticism in all knowledge. At best our impressions can yield probable knowledge, and certain knowledge is an unattainable goal. In his caution to keep his assumptions to the minimum, Hume could not re‑establish the natural world, the everyday world. His remained a chaotic world of approximations. Hume did not suspend beliefs and all traditional facts in order to reinstate them again at the end of his analysis. He tried to go as far as his radical method permitted him to go in tracing his source of evidence in experience.

On the other hand, by removing man from the context of traditional beliefs, however, the Transcendent school practically “bracketed” these beliefs[20] for examination by leaving nothing except the self and his confrontation with experience and Being. Like Hume, this school examines the means to know the surrounding phenomena in order to lay control over human environment (sayr al-àfàqí). Its unsophisticated radical empiricism advises in the first instance to study the connections and relationships of items of experience and to study the sources and evidence for changes in phenomena. It, of course, did not explore phenomena with the same epistemological rigor as Hume. But the fact that it started with an assumption‑free attitude in exploration and a method in first instance similar to Hume's seems to be certain. However, the Transcendent Philosophy does not remain in the state of ignorance – suspension of belief. It achieves perfection in knowledge and establishes its view of reality. The world of beliefs, conventions, and values that is temporarily shattered (through tawbah) by removal from the traditional environment is rebuilt and established by an independent inquiry. Hume was not willing to assert a certain proposition about any external or internal entity outside or inside the mind except the proposition: only impressions exist; whereas the Transcendent Philosophy, as is clear from its mystical aims, arrives at the questions about the very foundations of things: Who am I? Are there beings like me? Where am I going? What purpose is there for my life? What is my relationship to the surrounding world? Starting with an unbiased background it tries to find answers for these questions. By theses questions, one is supposed to have known that he had accepted many false opinions through tradition and that were he to attain truth and certainty for himself he should momentarily paralyze the effect of all inherited dogmas and previously held opinions.

The Transcendent school is like Descartes, who also sought a temporary release from the engulfing world of misty tradition:

I would have to undertake once and for all to set aside all opinions which I had previously accepted among my beliefs and start again from the very beginning... I have found a serene retreat in peaceful solitude. I will therefore make a serious unimpeded effort to destroy generally all my former opinions. In order to do this, however, it will not be necessary to show they are all false.[21]

As Descartes found peaceful solitude conducive to the application of his methodical doubt, so did the illuminative thinkers.

Again, like Descartes, a Transcendent philosopher not has to prove that all the opinions of his predecessors are false. The extrication of the mind from the corpus of available beliefs through presence is not a mark of skepticism or agnosticism but a mean of search for truth and certainty. By the same token, methodical doubt does not mean that Descartes was either a skeptic or an agnostic; but instead, wishing to find certainty he was forcibly led to demolish his old opinions down to their very foundations, because he realized how untrustworthy these opinions were. A Transcendent philosopher in his practical philosophizing provisionally wishes to suspend every concept and judgment about God, the world and the body by making himself begin his search without any such conceptions. Descartes also wished to “bracket” concepts and judgments about God, the world and the body.[22] Nor because he, or the illuminationists, really doubted the existence of God, the world or the body, but because everything they had learned about them had to be examined even if it happened to be something that is true. Of course, the Transcendent Philosophy differs from Descartes in that it did not doubt the reality of the external world nor did it bother to prove its existence. For this school, the proposition, “The world is,” is true. Nor is this school intending to establish a “wonderful science” of philosophy in the manner of Descartes and Husserl. Again, while pointing to the preceding significant resemblances between this school and those authors, one should be aware that these resemblances are not meant to blur the important differences between them. It is true that the Transcendent school’s aim, like Descartes’, is to commit us to the slow and laborious search for certainty and truth. However Descartes wanted to found his radical approach to truth and certainty using the deductive method in mathematics and pure reason; in contrast, the Transcendent school used a plurality of methods, e.g., the experimental, intuitive, deductive, and behavioral. Here we are not maintaining that the Transcendent school used the method of systematic doubt with the same efficacy and conscious elaboration as Descartes or Husserl. What we are advancing is that this school equally knew the importance of starting all philosophizing with a radical beginning and was awake to the impulse of Cartesian Meditations before Descartes.

“The same spirit was responsible for the continuing radicalization of his own philosophy” “free from presuppositions”.[23]

Also, in so far as Husserl derived his inspiration from the spirit of the Cartesian Meditations, the same resemblance’s that were discerned between Descartes and the Transcendent school can be discerned between the latter and Husserl:

... then is not this a fitting time to renew his [Descartes’] radicalness, the radicalness of the beginning philosopher: to subject to a Cartesian overthrow the immense philosophical literature with its medley of great traditions, of comparatively serious new beginnings, of stylish literary activity...and to begin with new meditations...at first we shall find out of action all the constrictions has been accepting up to now, including all our sciences.[24]

As was remarked earlier, both the Transcendent Philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology emphasized the notion of going back to the things themselves; the reaction against tradition that harbors unwarranted beliefs, dogmas and authoritarianism are shared by both philosophies. It is true that the Transcendent school was not after a universal radical science of philosophy like Husserl. In so far as it stressed a radical beginning to philosophy and the description of surrounding phenomena afresh, the Transcendent Philosophy was a phenomenology. However, apart from other considerations, the significance of phenomenology as propounded by Husserl was not as a philosophy perhaps, but as a method, discipline or a tendency.[25] The Transcendent school, in stripping man of all beliefs and in making him starts from the “beginning” by appealing to a direct encounter with and description of facts, can be considered aware of the phenomenological tendency and its far-reaching significance. In our discussion of the Transcendent epistemology, we shall point out the Transcendent employment of other aspects of the phenomenological method, such as the phenomenological reduction.[26]

Whether the above comparative remarks are accepted or not, it must be granted that the Transcendent school, through the attempts to comprehend the “secrets” of the universe, believes in the description and analysis of the aspects, qualities, and relations of experience in the world. The Transcendent school believes, as instanced by Sadrà,[27] that while theories may interpret facts, at the same time they abstract from the realities of the environing world as we encounter them in the locus of immediate experience. Pure theories, without concrete embodiment and without seeing them in their actual operation, estrange the mind from its natural dwelling place, the world of experience.

The Transcendent school, like other systems of mystical, Transcendent Philosophy, does not content itself with the deductive procedure to the exclusion of other procedures. Instead, it tends itself to a plurality of methods characterized by a gradual yet vital growth of movement, a movement of the totality of the human self in its attempt to comprehend and exercise mastery over its surroundings.[28]

However, although in substance the intimate nature of reality and experience is not altered when using these diverse methods, our attitudes, knowledge, and emotional cosmos progressively and drastically change; and these, in turn, determine our behavior. For Transcendent school, therefore, knowledge is not a bare conceptual understanding of reality and the systematization of its laws alone. Abstraction or pure theory impoverishes our significant relationship to nature and leaves us suspended in the intellectual landscape of semi‑real possibilities with our inwardness remaining enkindled and dull. On the other hand, true knowledge for this school, as for Socrates, Plato, and Kierkegaard, is that form of understanding that seeps into the depth and breadth of the personality and transforms the whole man: man is a mystic by nature. For Plato the philosophical enterprise culminates in love; for Kierkegaard it ends in an intense leap to the other “end”, namely, God; for the Transcendent Philosophy it becomes a passionate yearning to become Him.[29] The insistence by this school that scientific observation and the givenness of rational processes should in the final analysis embrace the ego in its totality and grip the individual in his very core, places this school among the forerunners of existential thought.[30] Consequently, this school emerges as a typical naturalistic mystic philosophy. It believes in the method of the natural sciences but is certainly conscious of the dynamic value of human emotions if they are directed to the right goal. This goal is God, the being, and the embodiment of perfection and beauty.

Along with all the preceding emphasis on a radical beginning of philosophy by the mentioned philosophies, must go the understanding that absolute radicalness is an ideal short of complete actualization. The Transcendent school, Descartes, Hume, and Husserl, despite their emphasis on radicalism, could not start their philosophizing with an absolute beginning, that is, without any presuppositions at all. Should our inquiry permit an examination of their views on this point, it would not be hard to show that their own views are based on certain presuppositions too. The temporary “relief” from established dogmas may help facilitate the clarity of the philosopher’s task, but cannot affect a long-lasting overthrow of these beliefs. The complete freedom from presuppositions, as it is clearly shown in the history of philosophy and other compartments of human knowledge such as the sciences, is a misconception and a myth; or, as Marvin Farber says:

Supposedly radical procedure may turn out to be a means of reinstating a vested tradition of long standing. That positive...findings of real worth may be attained in the process does not alter the fact that such a procedure serves special interests if it finally accords with… any vested tradition.[31]

The claim that philosophy must have a presuppositionless beginning, Farber says, can itself be judged as the greatest presupposition. It is simply impossible to remove oneself from one’s natural and cultural framework that is “a basic immediate fact of philosophy”. For instance, to be able to detect the Transcendent school’s presuppositions in his radical attempt, one must try to discern the motives behind its systematic mystical aims. The same applies to Descartes, Hume and Husserl. These motives are generally culturally conditioned and inspired.

One of the Transcendent school’s presuppositions was the intention to present the reader with the “secrets of Transcendent philosophy” whose basic tenets it believed are true; on the other hand, in Descartes, Hume and Husserl, the motive of certainty was assumed from the very beginning. Descartes’ radical beginning culminated in reinstating the culturally acquired conception of God, the existence of the external world, and the traditional conception of the soul. Hume’s strict empiricism presupposed certainty in sense experience and restored the empirical tradition and the psychological atomism of Locke; whereas Husserl’s radicalism assumed the stream of cogitations, or pure consciousness and indubitability of immediate experience as the starting point of philosophizing. He also reaffirmed the basic spirit of German idealism in general. The Transcendent school, on the other hand reinstated the long‑standing tradition of Persian-Muslim philosophy of mysticism. It shelved or suspended the traditional beliefs, only to reaffirm them again and in substance in its painstaking search for the truth. The Islamic Persian mystical conceptions of emanation, creation and eternity of the world, immortality of the soul, and union with God were suspended by the radical beginning only to reappear in a different style. Despite their determined efforts to dislodge the Sisyphus rock of traditional beliefs and cultural setting, philosophers seem to be endlessly tied to it.

What we called the eidetic reduction in the Transcendent method, as we have seen, consists of two sub-reductions (i) from appearances to their essences and (ii) from their essences to the essence of knowing self. Such reductions are reflective and we entitled them eidetic simply because they concerns at any rate with essence (eidetic means here ‘essential’; derived from ‘eidos’ meaning ‘pure essence’). In other words, the residuum of such reductions is essences – in the former reduction, essences of things, and in the latter, and essence of myself as ‘I’. Since the word “essence” is central here in the eidetic field, it may be useful if we first know what essence means for the Transcendent Philosophy. Sadrà has largely discussed essence attending it in its full details in his huge work al-Asfàr. Obviously, a detailed discussion of his theory of essence does not concern us here simply because it is beyond the boundary of this paper. We would preferably refer to it when necessarily applicable. For the time being, regarding its meaning, we would mention here that essence has two senses for Sadrà: (i) concept (mafhum/wujud dhihní) (ii) limit of existence.[32] The eidetic reduction concerns with the first sense by which our mind reflectively constitutes the essences of things including our ‘selves’ of which we reflectively have knowledge. Whereas, the ontetic reduction, as we will see, concerns with the second sense of essence which is elaborated by Sadrà for the first time due to his special theory of being. Let us speak of these senses a bit more.

Sadrà discusses essence (màhiyyah) with regard to existence. However, Sadrà finally dissolves the traditional distinction of essence-existence to the benefit of a special kind of existentialism. It is a methodological habit for Sadrà to start with the traditional doctrines and then to push them toward his own theories through wonderful interpretations and logical discussions in terms of the Transcendent method and aims. It is the case when he starts with this traditional distinction. He argues[33] that this distinction is reflectively made. When we are in the level of reflection we suppose that a thing has an existence and an essence. This distinction is good enough to phenomenologically justify our knowledge of ourselves, things and world;[34] because we temporarily, and just for the sake of knowledge, (like Husserl) withdraw the external existence of ourselves, things and world (even God) to describe their essences; that is, to catch, as far as we can, a clear concept (mafhum), that is a mental existence (wujud dhihní) of this or that thing with which the reflective knowledge can only be possible. This epistemological approach to essence indicates that essence is concept and nothing more. Essence, in this sense, is an answer to the question: "what is it?” (mà huwa/hiiah?). (For example, when one asks: “what is it?” questioning a particular shape and we answer: “triangle”.) The answer to this question determines the essence of the thing under question. Sadrà says that the answer to such a question is a universal concept, a genus that can be crystallized for example in Aristotelian table of categories. Since it is concept, the categorical analysis of things, however, is by all ways conceptual. It is valid only if we remain in the order of concept. Nevertheless, when we turn away from this order and attend the order of being the meaning of essence differs: In the latter case, essence is no longer a conceptual answer to the question: “what is it?”; rather, it is the special being of the thing under question: It is what by which the thing is thing (mà bih al-shay' shay'); and what by which a thing is thing is, for Sadrà, its special being.[35]

In the latter sense, Sadrà deduces essence from Being. Essence in this sense is the limit of a particular existence; that is to say, what demarks a thing from the others. Of course, this demarker, essence, is not for Sadrà here a concept; rather it is the particular being of that thing. Sadrà tries to demonstrate this point through several discussions in detail.[36] He concludes that the special being of a thing is the principle of its particularity and individuality.[37]

It is true that every thing has two folds: one is its existence and another is its essence. However, Sadrà explains, these two are not separated in the external reality, but their separation is in our mind; in the external reality and as a matter of fact, its essence is nothing but its very existence; this is our mind that reflectively understands a thing as a two-fold fact. Essence as separated is only produced by the formal reflection and is merely concept; then so far as it is considered as mental, it has an epistemological function. Belonging to the order of concept, epistemology as well as any description (including phenomenology), therefore, concerns only with essence.

We would mention that essence in the sense of concept on which all epistemology, reflection, formalism, logicism and subjectivism are grounded requires us to pick up different methods to achieve, to justify and to demonstrate reflectively what we have and catch existentially through our everydayness experience and ontetic presence. It is what we would attend in the following section.

As already hinted, the Transcendent school advocated a plurality of methods of inquiry in the field of the eidetic reduction, and that these reinforced one another in the processes of noetic elevation no attempt was made to fully designate these methods among which we may mention the Inductive, Deductive, and Introspection. In employing the first and the third, this school displays a tempered form of the phenomenological tendency and a tint of its notions. These methods belong to and applied in the eidetic field that is, in Transcendent terminology to sayr al-àfàqí in which we reflectively discover ourselves, surrounding world, and even God, through these plurality of methods and, on this discovery, we build experimental and speculative sciences which all concern with essences, that means here for the Sadrian philosophy concepts. Experimental sciences are fundamentally based on ‘induction’, while speculative sciences employ ‘deduction’. However, there is cooperative between them. The inductive and deductive methods cooperate continuously until we discern the unity of all bodily and animal species. We move from the visible to the invisible by cooperation of induction and deduction: an intellectual jump from a limited number of observations to a universal and unlimited number, to the universe as a whole.

Moreover, the inductive method prepares us to discover God deductively; the proofs for both the eternity and creation of the world and the like are also instances of the Transcendent school’s rigorous application of the deductive method promoted by the loyal help of inductive inquiry.

Not only this; the method of introspection is also applied in this field as well and cooperates the inductive and deductive methods. Introspection fundamentally is a psychological method for self-knowledge ('ilm al-nafs) which interrelates with induction and deduction. From an eidetic point of view, we reflectively intuit ourselves as an ‘I’ of the essence of which we have a knowledge – that is we have a concept of our own selves. This is reflective of course; simply because we constitute our essence as ‘I’, not in the sense that we existentially create it (as done by the ontetic reduction); rather, in the sense that we conceptually abstract an essence as ‘I’ through introspection of ourselves as the agent who reflects and thinks and then exists (Cogito).[38]

On this, we may see that this method of introspection seems as Husserlian eidetic intuition by which we grasp the bare essence of the self and constitute the essences in the reflective consciousness. However as we will see this is nit the final grasp for the Transcendent Philosophy as it is for Husserlian phenomenology: the eidetic intuition, according to Husserl guarantees the certainty of knowledge; whereas for the Transcendent Philosophy, what we grasp by introspection as well as induction and deduction are grounded by a deeper level of our existence in which we are in touch with the beings, contact Being; we have not only vision as inspired by intuition (as we see in the history of philosophy); we also live with Being and continually experience the beings with which we are in ontetic touch. It is this deeper level that, according to the Transcendent philosophy, grounds our constitution of essences. We will see the mechanism of this grounding later. Though Husserlian phenomenology ends up with this eidetic reduction which implies the constitution of pure essences through an eidetic intuition, and does not pass, as does the Transcendent Philosophy, toward a deeper reduction of essences to being – i.e. the ontetic reduction, there seems yet to be similarities between these two schools regarding the eidetic reduction. In next section we will briefly depict a comparison between them to show these similarities.

We have already hinted that in applying its method to the eidetic field, the Transcendent school has implicitly adopted procedures partly similar to those fulfilled in phenomenology. Now, we would have a closer look here at this point to mention the similarities between these schools and to describe the Transcendent notion of the eidetic reduction in parallel to and in comparison with the phenomenological reduction. In doing so, we are, however, cautious not to sacrifice precision and coherence in interpretation by a random free mode of association imposed by our mind on the facts imbedded in this school’s work. Nor are we trying to “over-modernize” this philosophy, thus rendering our comments disproportionate with the original. We are simply showing the modern relevance of an old method and its implications.

There is solid evidence in the Transcendent epistemology to uphold the contention that it is implicitly aware of the basic themes and some significant aspects of the phenomenological tendency. It is so because along with the Transcendent insights go certain phenomenological elements that are employed without calling them such. These elements are: the three aspects of the phenomenological reduction, descriptive procedure, intentionality, and the noetic and noematic processes of the mind. The Transcendent Philosophy did not utilize such elements of the phenomenological tendency to the extreme in order to establish, like Husserl, a descriptive science.[39] However, in the Transcendent approach, the affinities, resemblances to, and anticipations of Husserl’s phenomenological procedure are basic and genuine. The difference between the two schools is one of emphasis, degree and full active application.

The first of the three reductions has already been discussed in connection with our comparison of both thinkers on the issue of the radical beginning of philosophy. We shall categorize this early stage of the Transcendent thought by the stipulative phrase: “cultural reduction”; it is characterized by the Transcendent hypothetical destruction of all varieties of cultural expression and traditional beliefs; this constituted a break between it and the inter-subjective world of human achievements.[40] Similarly, Husserl described the initial stage of his phenomenological reduction as the “disconnection” of “All varieties of cultural expression, works of ... the fine arts, of the sciences, also aesthetic and practical values of every shape and form...also realities of...moral custom, law, and religion.”[41]

Both schools considered the telos of such a reduction as man’s freedom from all traditional and trans-phenomenal beliefs; this reduction leaves only the immediately given and thus excludes the conviction in an independent metaphysical reality. From the outset the self possesses only the freshness and immediacy of objects.

Now, in a Husserlian vein, the Transcendent school says that we commence our descriptive procedure of phenomena. This procedure ultimately leads us to two kinds of phenomenological reductions which one may call ‘essential’ and transcendental’ reductions: these will soon become apparent.

The naturalistic method is, according to the Transcendent Philosophy, intertwined with a strain of subjectivity from the beginning; it entailed reflection and inward appropriation of the results of the experimental search. For instance, soon after we discerned the essence of the man, and other essences as well, our mind becomes infused with yearning (shawq) [42] for them. Thus, our attention is turned away from particular objects to their essences. These essences are eidetic, to borrow a term from Husserl. Here our initial performance of essential reduction of our experience can be observed.

One can consider here that Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, the epoch, is not new.[43] As the Transcendent school depicts, every movement of our mind in describing phenomena contains a reduction of natural objects to pure types, structures or essences. This is why we categorize this movement of thought as essential reduction, a step on the way to purifying phenomena. This method is, therefore, simple, being designated as a persistent description of objects, intuiting their essences and deflecting attachment from these objects to their structures and the individual “thinness” or “thanes” of entities is progressively eliminated. It is obvious that this essential reduction is similar to Husserl’s eidetic reduction, which is also a matter of universality versus individuality.

For the sake of summery, let us highlight the chief points in the transcendent eidetic reduction, as we called it, only to mention the possible similarities between these two schools:

a) In this transcendent manner, our mind and experiences possessed a definite intentionality that fulfilled itself in apprehending purified essences and in surpassing these to reach the being.

b) We bracket the natural world, perform a continuous radical suspension of the previous objectifying position, and comprehensively placed the physical world in abeyance.

c) We complement the essential reduction, previously noted, by performing what one may call a transcendental reduction; thus, we not only suspend the physical world and natural attitude, but also reflectively bracket the essences themselves and intentionally focus on the ultimate source of both the natural and “essential” modes of being. For the Transcendent school the experience resulting from this reduction is, as Husserl says, “The only experience which may properly be called “internal”.[44]

d) Every time we discern an essence we rise from the immediacy of particular objects to the level of conscious generality, progressively conceptualize nature, and reduce it to “essential” structures; our mind transforms seeing and perceiving into conceiving. This involves the apprehension of essences and a reference to their denotations. In mind, therefore, there is a bifurcation. From “one point of view” these essences denote (intend) a multiplicity of individual things, from another they connote Transcendent structures. Accordingly, for mind essences are both conceptual and ontological and are both immanent and Transcendent.

e) With respect to point (d), mind performs two functions: an “upward” and a “downward” movement. In apprehending essences, mind is elevated above material objects, bracketing these only temporarily; to confirm our apprehension of essences mind goes back to material objects. Hence there is a two‑way traffic between mind and the objects: the experiencing from which result the essences, and in turn the reference of these essences to the experienced.[45] Husserl named these two aspects of the cognitive process the noetic and noematic.[46] The Transcendent Philosophy was aware of these two processes of the mind, or at least, it permits such an interpretation.

Furthermore, the types or essences apprehended by mind are stripped of their material contents. Similar to its processes in points (d) and (e) mind through these purified essences “intends” physical phenomena and discover a higher level in which the internal meaning of these essences and that of the entire universe are constituted. This higher level is, according to the Transcendent Philosophy, Being that is the hidden meaning of every descriptive experience and every thing.

In its essential reduction of phenomena, the Transcendent Philosophy does not completely abandon the naturalistic attitude; it has a constant recurrence to it. On the other hand, phenomenology claims to be a non-empirical science; but, it seems, as long as the contents of the mind stem from the description of facts, phenomenology cannot divorce itself from the naturalistic world completely. The Transcendent Philosophy, wisely perhaps, did not go as far as Husserl did. Reduction did not categorically cut off the empirical facts from which the essential structures are discriminated. Husserl probably was aware of this point, but for motives of his own did not subscribe to it.[47] It seems that the complete flight and freedom from natural facts is, indeed, a view precipitated by an uncontrolled mode of fancy touching the fringe of lunacy.

In the above description of the structure of the Transcendent method, we saw that there is a special kind of reduction to which there is no correspondence in phenomenology – even perhaps in modern western philosophy as a whole. This reduction which we called it Ontetic Reduction is that keystone on which the Transcendent Philosophy is founded. We confine ourselves here to present it so far as our research is concerned. Therefore, introducing the notion of the ontetic reduction in a comparative way, we try to show how Sadrian philosophy goes beyond the eidetic reduction and reduces all essences to existence. In the rest of this paper, we discuss this reduction to existence.

What is this reduction? A return to being as such; a return of things; to their reality in general; a return of the self to its principle. In the latter case, this reduction, as hinted, consists of two sub-reductions. Compared with Husserlian phenomenology, the ontetic reduction is not in parallel to the eidetic reduction; rather it goes to extend beyond the eidetic reduction. While the eidetic reduction ends up in exploration of essences to reflectively understand the reality of things, this ontetic reduction passes from this level to a deeper ground; to the root of that level to touch the reality (being) of the things. Again while the eidetic reduction ends up in discovery of a Transcendental self, a monad that implies a radical subjectivism, the ontetic reduction tries to escape from this subjectivism by justifying our knowledge on the basis of the special mode of our being. However, before attempting to understand the Transcendent (Sadrian) approach to existence/Being, it will be useful to see the place of the notion of existence in phenomenology.

“Like the neo-Kantian” Ricoeur writes “Husserl lost the ontological dimension”.[48] In fact, Husserl’s phenomenology clearly implies essentialism, excluding the notion of existence and Being. The suspension of belief in the existence of a phenomenon or the explicit doubt (following Descartes) that the phenomenon exists, is what Husserl refereed to as “bracketing”. This procedure is to concentrate on “what” of the phenomenon in order to ascertain its essential content.[49] Therefore, the preconception that we possess about the nature of existence to be put aside.

E. Fink has stated that Husserl avoided the notion of existence and Being or the ‘ontological problem’– the problem of “how the pure being of an existent is related to the being-an-object of this existent”. As Fink states, this problem has been rejected by Husserl as a ‘falsy put problem’.[50] This seems to be the result of his subjectivism, which based on the notion of essence.

Every fact, every individual subject, according to Husserl, has an essence, a permanent cluster of essential predicates by virtue of which it is what it is and is able to receive accessory and contingent determinations: a quid may be converted into an idea, and eidetic intuition is always possible. But how does one pass from the essence to the individual? Husserl makes this transition by means of the notion of the eidetic singularity. This notion presupposes that the eidetic individual is not the empirical individual existing here and now: Essence, even if singular, is not existence, although both are irreducible substrata for every new syntactical form. Yet there is an essence of the existing particular, under which the particular is immediately subsumed – subsumption being understood as the transition from the eidetic to the empirical plane rather than as the subsumption, within the eidetic realm, of the species under the genus. For us to apprehend this essence, concrete eidetic singularity must be distinguished from abstract eidetic singularity: the abstract is the object related to a whole as a dependent part. Species and genus are necessarily dependent, hence abstract; but the concrete is the independent essence, which, without being contained in a whole, contains dependent essences within itself: the phenomenal thing, which is a concrete essence, contains the abstract essences of extension and quality. The individual is thus the this-here whose material essence (or whose eidetic singularity) is a concrete[51] and which hence merits being termed “individual,” that is, indivisible. By granting such an extension to essences,[52] Husserl turns to existence as such. He certainly does not deduce existence from essence, and it is worth noting that the notion of dependence is interpreted in such a way that the general depends on the singular, just as the formal depends on the material: The purely logical form, for example the categorical form of object, is dependent with respect to all that is the matter of objects .[53] The individual is, therefore, primordial individual.

Existence as such is, it follows independent logically, but not with respect to logic itself; existence is not the radical other of essence. The theory of essence is the expression of a subjectivism, which would allow all essences to be termed a priori. If the Husserlian conception of the a priori has not appeared to be as rigorously constitutive in the relation of subject to the external object, it is because it does not encounter outside of it a content to be constituted. In this perspective all essences are instituted by the transcendental subjectivity. Thus Husserl would end in a rationalistic empiricism in the sense that the return to the things themselves would be a return of the cogito to itself. For Husserl, essence is more than a word since it is the object of an intuition, which is fulfilled; yet the individual as example and as infima species fills intuition. On contrary, if essence for Husserl is not completely nominal, existence on the other hand is somewhat so; the object is only an example, that is, a specimen.[54]

Husserl ends up in a kind of essentialism which, considered from a Transcendent point of view, has no exit from the maze of reflection. If essence is true and not existence, a Transcendent philosopher like Sadrà may ask, how can we go out from the trap of subjectivism? Husserl’s ultimate appeal to the eidetic intuition gives us nothing but essence, and essence is the truth of consciousness and the subject. Moreover, the nominalistic approach Husserl has taken regarding existence seems, from a Transcendent point of view, the fundamental error. We will mention later in this paper the Sadrian analysis of the essence, which leads to existence. But let us have a glance at the existential phenomenology’s response to Husserl, before attending Sadrà’s theory.

The existential phenomenologists purport to supply the lack of existence or Being in the Husserlian Phenomenology. “In Fink view” Farber writes, “this is the most fundamental problem which phenomenology omits because of its shrinking from speculative thought.”[55]

Heidegger also complains that the “question [of Being] has been forgotten”,[56] and “as long as the truth of Being is not thought all ontology remains without its foundation”.[57] He applies phenomenology to detect an answer to this question. “Phenomenology is the name for the method of ontology”[58] and therefore, the phenomenological reduction for him sounds a different meaning and task:

“For Husserl the phenomenological reduction ... is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness for us. Phenomenological reduction means leading back from the apprehension of a being ... to the understanding of the being of this being.”[59]

Husserl introduced an explicitly “Transcendental reduction”, which reduced all objects to products of the Transcendental self. It is on this point that Heidegger makes his most radical break with Husserl and the subjectivistic thought. We need not postulate a “thinking substance” or “ego” as this subject, as Descartes did. Nor need we even accept this notion of ‘I Think’ as a necessary condition or a ‘unifying principle’ for knowledge, as Kant did. In short, we do not accept a distinction between subject and object. Heidegger suggests the rejection of this distinction, and with it the rejection of the innumerable of epistemological problems, which have plagued modern philosophy. According to Heidegger there is no self. There is simply “Being‑in‑the‑world”. The world is no more ‘bracketable’ than the Transcendental self is necessary. Once we rid ourselves of the Transcendental self we save ourselves from philosophical skepticism as well. It is here that Heidegger speaks of Dasein instead of the self. Considering the being of the self, Heidegger calls human being Dasein (literally translated “Being there”):

Dasein is an entity, which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is distinguished by the fact that, in its very being, that Being is an issue for it.... It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its Being, this Being is disclosed to it. Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being.[60]

Dasein has “being in such a way that one has an understanding of Being.”[61] Because of this essential relationship of Dasein (human being) to Being, the problem of Being must be approached through an investigation of Dasein; therefore, fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein.[62]

If to interpret the meaning of Being becomes our task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be interrogated; it is also that entity which already comports itself, in its Being, towards what we are asking about when we ask this question.[63]

The claim that we may come to understand Being through an analysis of Dasein looks dangerously similar to the traditional Cartesian approach to philosophy. Descartes wanted to capture (necessary) truths about the world (Being) and began with the discovery and analysis of the subject, of the cogito, of experience and knowledge. Similarly, Kant approached his theory of knowledge by examining the subjective or a priori conditions for experience and knowledge, and Husserl began his phenomenological investigations with an examination of the reduced ‘pure’ ego. Now, in spite of his departure from these philosophers, it might appear that Heidegger is also beginning his investigation with an examination of the subject of experience and knowledge, for the analysis of Dasein is explicitly presented as an answer to the traditional metaphysical question of self-identity. It is of the utmost necessity, therefore, that we understand that the analysis of Dasein for Heidegger is not the examination of a subject, or an ego, or consciousness, and that the “self‑identity” which becomes a problem in the question “Who is Dasein?” is a very different problem than it becomes for Descartes, Kant, and Husserl. The nature of Dasein thus becomes the focal point of Being and Time, for it is with this new conception of human being that Heidegger intends to defend his attacks on Husserl’s conception of phenomenology, to commence his answer to the “problem of Being”, and to attract Western philosophy as misguided.[64]

Other existential phenomenologists like Sartre have more or less followed Heideggerian trace to supply the lack of existence or Being in the Husserlian phenomenology. Objecting to the existential phenomenologists, Farber says: “It may be observed that if Husserl missed this problem [i.e. Being or existence], then so did the existentialists. Only Husserl had a right – and in fact an obligation – to ‘miss’ it and they did not.”[65]

A discussion as to how far the existential phenomenology’s attempt to supply that lack has been successful is beyond our present research. However, in order to distinct some differences between the existential phenomenology’s and the Transcendent Philosophy’s approaches toward existence or Being, we would preferably remark a point: while they claim a return to Being or existence, what is discussed by the existential phenomenologists actually is not existence or Being as such; rather, it is ultimately confined to a special being, that is, to sum of cogito. For instance, as we saw in the above quotation from Fink, he devoted the “ontological problem” to the “being of the existent”. Heidegger, who anew projects the question of being, also discovers it in the being of Dasein, namely the subject considered as a special existent; in the kind of being of the Transcendental ‘constitutor’. He says: “The question of the meaning of being is the most universal and the emptiest of questions, but at the same time it is possible to individualize it very precisely for any particular Dasein.”[66]

Perhaps it is why Husserl critically remarks: “Thus existence (Dasein) in man is equivalent to understanding of being”; and he infers from Heidegger’s text that existence may well be identified with “understanding of being”.[67] It may also be the case when one remember that the notion of Being is the “emptiest” for Heidegger and he then return to the notion of “nothing” in his what is metaphysics? [68](also Sartre). So considered, Being is always grounded by Dasein (at least in Being and Time) and raised in the “horizon of time”: “Our provisional aim”, he writes, “is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being.”[69]

Apart from evaluation of Heideggerian (thus Sartrean etc.) notion of Being, and despite the probable similarities, the above concept is not completely applicable to the Transcendent philosophers such as Sadrà who considers Being as such, and sets forth a new sense of Being. A bit more clarification in this respect will be found in the following section.

As we have pointed out, Husserlian phenomenological reduction dismisses Being or existence and contains the eidetic reduction applying it to discover the essences constituted by/in consciousness. Interpreting the phenomenological reduction, the existential phenomenology passed toward existence and Being to avoid the Husserlian subjectivism. In parallel to this existential phenomenology’s effort, and in an absolutely different manner and aims, the Transcendent (Sadrian) Philosophy aims at Being reducing all entities, essences, consciousness, and even the self itself (mind, subject, spirit etc.) to Being. This reduction is what we call the ontetic reduction. Applied to the self, this reduction implies a mutual relationship between the self and Being. Let us here speak of a few comparative points concerning this reduction:

Like Heidegger, Sadrà, turns to Being saying that Being is the subject of philosophy.[70] However, contrary to Heidegger who discovers the meaning of Being by analyzing of Dasein – i.e. being of a special kind of beings[71]– Sadrà keeps himself dealing with Being as Such. In the opening of his major work al-Asfàr,[72] he tries to demonstrate the primordiality of Being: Being is the root. He fundamentally distinct Being from quiddity, existence from essence and asserts that nothing is real except existence or Being – No Being, then no reality or truth; no Being, no beings nothing ever emerged.

Again, like Heidegger, Sadrà says that existence or Being which is reality or truth, is never captured by the mind, which can only capture essences and general notions. This does not mean for Sadrà, however, that we have no access to the reality of Being (as one may say about Kantian noumenon); rather, we are living in/with/by Being – says Sadrà. Since we are rooted in Being and our mind is emerged from/by Being as its constantly flowing manifestation (see next chapter), we then are always living with/in it. According to Sadrà, we are ‘at home with’ Being, to borrow a phrase from Heidegger. He expressly says: “The ways toward Being are as numerous as the selves.”[73]

This way to Being, however, is prior to and root of all supposed aspects of a being. In other words, these aspects whatsoever are in fact reduced to Being, because they are determinations (ta'ayyunàt) of Being manifested as this or that being. If there is an understanding of Being, as Heidegger maintains,[74] it is because we already are in touch with Being. To be sure, it is not subject to a logical analysis. However, like Heidegger who tries to achieve an analysis of the understanding of Being, Sadrà also holds that it is possible to try for an analysis of our mysterious, non-reflective living with-in Being.

To do this, Sadrà uses the Transcendent method; as Heidegger uses the phenomenological method. Heidegger’s employment of the phenomenological method, of course, implies a reorientation of that method.[75] Interpreting the phenomenology as a method for ontology, Heidegger adds to Husserlian reduction two new stages: construction and de-construction; and he combines them in an expression: de-construction;[76] because “construction in philosophy” he says “is necessarily de-construction, that is to say, a de-constructing of traditional concepts.”[77]

As an occlusion one may conclude that the de-constructive method is the fruit of the phenomenological method when applied to ontology.

Without confusing the issue,[78] one may consider that the ontetic reduction Sadrà uses emphasis on a leap in parallel to Heidegger’s de-construction. De-construction by which Heidegger returns to the history of philosophy to discover the meaning of being in the horizon of time, means for Sadrà, if at all, de-construction of essentialism, and ontetic reduction to Being. This means that we should demark, in Sadrian manner, the realm of essence – which is subject to eidetic reduction and, as Sadrà maintains,[79] structurises the subject or the mind and reflective thought – on the one hand, and the realm of Being – which is ground and reality of, say, the self and its ontetic presence – from the other hand. According to Sadrà, only by this manner – to borrow Heidegger’s term, by deconstructing essentialism – we can reach the source of knowledge.[80] We will consider Sadrà’s analysis of essence in the following section; but before shifting to that section one question may be answered here: Why does Sadrà emphasis so much on the, so to speak, de-construction of essentialism? We can readily extract answer to this question from within Sadrà’s system. We say ‘extract’ because he is not asked such a question, then, there is no explicit answer to such a hidden question. We can nevertheless see how an answer follows from his general position.

What is real and truth is only Being. Essence is not real and truth in itself; rather its truth or reality comes from its mental being. It is What Sadrà Says. What is essence then? Mind’s abstraction of external or internal objects; they are constituted in our mind by imagination and then they constitutes our reflective consciousness and thought. Sadrà maintains that our reflection occurs only through essences. He holds that our reflection always analyzes an entity in two aspects: its existence and its essence. But in external world there is no essence as we will see in the following section; the external entity, Sadrà says, is a manifestation of Being, then its reality is pure being, so it has no essence, or if has this essence is nothing but its existence. (Sadrà tries to demonstrate this by establishing a few principles like that of conservation of Being and that of the hierarchical structure of being.) If so, essences are constituted in the mind by imagination through the process of perception, and the mind categorizes them so that it can reflectively think. In short, according to Sadrà the structure of thought is essentialist (eidetic in Husserlian term). But how can we escape from the maze of reflection? (Why escape? Note that he wants to justify an ontetic presence which is the base of the mystical apprehension.) The answer is simple: By breaking down the palace of essentialism. If essence forms the texture of reflection and reflection supposed to be surpassed, then no way is for Sadrà but deconstructing essentialism. Now in the rest of this paper we will see his analysis of essence in particular.

Contrary to Husserl, existence is not somehow nominal and void for Sadrà. He strongly asserts that nothing is real except existence. But this existence, which is sole reality, is never captured by the mind, which can only capture essences and general notions. Hence there is a fundamental difference between general notion of being or existence and those of essences. Since, for him, 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 can not know or capture the nature of existence, since existence is the objective reality and its transformation into an abstract mental concept necessarily falsifies it. In other words, what exist is the uniquely particular; hence it can not be known by the conceptual mind, whereas an essence is by itself a general notion and hence can be known by the mind. No wonder then, that philosophers who operated by an abstract notion of existence, declared it to be an empty concept, 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 that 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 existence is that it is outside the mind and every thing whose nature it is to be outside of the mind can never possibly come into mind – or, else, its nature will be completely transformed – hence, existence can never be [conceptually] known by any mind.[81]

It is true 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. If existence was 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. Sadrà has forbidden this earlier on the ground that existences are unique and no general notion can do justice to the uniqueness of real beings. Further, being static, each instance of an essence is identically the same. No instance of an essence is a unique individual but only a case and yields indifferently the same result as any other instance of the same essence.

Essence, Sadrà says, is nothing in itself, whatever being it possesses is due to its being manifestations of and relation 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 [of non-being] and their original state of non-existence.... 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 can not point to them either when they are considered out of relation with their sustaining Creator, since these have no existence independently. However, in themselves, these existences are concrete realities, unaffected by the indeterminacy [of essences], and pure existence without [the admixture] of essences and simple lights without any darkness.[82]

By ‘conjoined’ or ‘united’, Sadrà does not mean that as a matter of fact two things or realities come together and are united, since, according to him, essences possess no reality of their own: It is the modes of existence that necessarily give rise to essences, wherein existence is the real, essence, the subjective element. When existence becomes further and further diversified into modes, these modal existences generate diverse essences.

Let us now revert to the Sadrian analysis of essences, which ends up in pure existence. The steps in this analysis are: (1) the genus is identical with or parallel to the potentiality of matter, while the differentia is identical with the actualized form; (2) that genus, because of its imperfection and indeterminacy, requires and is perfected by the differentia; (3) that differentia is the only reality, since genus, as a pure potentiality in the nature of matter, can not form part of the actual existence; (4) that, hence differentia equals existence; and (5) that what is called ‘species’ or ‘specific nature’ is nothing but a classification of objects by the mind since actual existents exhibit certain characteristics whereby the mind is able to compare and contrast them and put them in different classes.

In his discussion of the Aristotelian dualism of matter-form (in the object) or that of genus-differentia (in the subject), Sadrà attempts to insert this dualism logically into the concept of essence; that is to say, he assigns it to the phenomenology of mind (Husserl’s).[83] His analysis of these dualisms ends up in a sort of existence he called it differentia that its Sadrian sense differs from the traditional sense. Whereas matter refers to something in the real world, genus is in the realm of concepts; but in either case, what concretely comes to exist both in the real world and in the mind is the differentia for both matter and genus ‘lose themselves in its concreteness’.

If we consider more closely the relationship between genus and differentia, it appears that the Aristotelian distinctions here are purely mental, for in the reality only the differentia exists. This is brought out clearly by a consideration of ‘simple’ differentia as opposed to composite ones. In the case of ‘black color’, e.g., what exists is black and apparently there is nothing in reality corresponding to ‘color’. In view of this, some philosophers have denied that, in the case of colors, there is either a general genus or a genuine differentia. This, however, is a capital mistake. For although the analysis into geniuses and differentiate is only a mental operation, there is some warrant in reality to make this distinctions and classifications. Nevertheless, what this shows is that existential reality is not composed of geniuses and differentiae but of modes of existence, i.e. simple differentiae. For, in truth, there is no such thing as a composite differentia in reality; there are only successive modes of existence. In this context, Sadrà asserts that the whole reality is nothing but a succession of differentia, which, in turn, is nothing but successive modes of existence.

Based on the Aristotelian matter-form formula, but by transforming it into a genus-differentia formula, the status of the differentia has been assigned a far greater importance in the system of Avicenna, and particularly by declaring differentia to be simple and irreducible, it has become allied to the unique and unanalysable fact of existence. But differentia, for him, is not identical with existence, which in some sense stands outside the matter-form or genus-differentia formula even though the differentia helps bring the genus into an existential situation. Differentia, indeed, as part of the specific essence (composed of genus and differentia) is subsumable under a genus and is, therefore, part of what Aristotle called ‘secondary substance’.

For Sadrà, on the other hand, the differentia is neither a substance nor an accident, since it is identical with individual existence. To support this last proposition, Sadrà develops an argument, which interprets the genus-differentia formula in accordance with his doctrine of the emergent existence or ‘substantial change’ and thus assimilates it to essence-existence principle.

In the progression of reality, we see that the movement is from the potential to the actual where every prior to the actual where every prior is matter or genus for every posterior: wood, e.g., is matter or genus for a chair. Now Aristotle describes both matter and form as secondary substances. In the case of primary matter itself – which does not exist – one can distinguish a quasi-genus and a quasi-form element. For, primary matter is characterized by pure potentiality; hence, it is something that has potentiality, where something stands for gnus and has potentiality stands for the form, but of course, the conjunction of the two is still a mere potential, without actual existence. Sadrà, therefore, insists that prime matter is not a pure genus but a species, since it does possess a differentia and it is thanks to this differentia that it has a positive tendency of potentiality which brings it out of pure nothingness and, further, that this species is restricted to one individual, i.e. that something which has the potentiality of existence.

Just as prime matter has only a potentiality for existence, so is the case with every genus relative to its form or differentia, the only difference between prime matter and other genuses being that prime matter, even with its differentia, is only potential, whereas other genuses become actual when a differentia becomes available. Now, since a genus is only a potentiality relative to its differentia, and since genus at the same time is ‘secondary substance’, it follows that a secondary substance does not exist. It is a mere ‘something’, a mere logical subject, not a real subject. Real subjects are only existential objects, which are the differentiae, not genuses. Further, since the potential is caused and actualized by something real, it follows that genus is brought into existence and actualized by the differentia. The differentia is the final cause, the perfection of genus. With the differentia, genus as such evaporates and is taken up in it. It is not the case that the differentia is simply ‘added to’ or exists alongside of the genus in a thing; it is the actualized genus; it is the thing. Hence Sadrà equates the differentia with existence and pronounces it to be a mode of existence.

In the entire progression of existence, the preceding mode of reality becomes genus for and ‘loses itself’ in the succeeding differentia:

It has become clear to you from what we have said... that that whereby a thing is constituted and exists...is nothing but the principle of the last differentia wherein all the preceding differentiae and forms which become united in it come to be nothing but potentialities, conditions and instruments for the reality that is the last differentia.[84]

Thus, this movement represents a progressive diminution of essence and preponderance of existence until we reach the pure existence without essence.

From this account follows the unreality of species, or specific essences. A species is obtained by the mind by combining a genus with a differentia and subsuming the latter under the former. But existentially, the case is exactly opposite: there the genuses lose themselves in the concrete reality of the differentia and vanish without a trace; they become simple and unique modes of existence. How does the mind then carry out its analyses and produce definitions with their multiplicity of concepts? Sadrà’s reply to this question is based on his view of the disparate nature of the realm of existence and the logical or conceptual mind. In the existential world there is existence or modes of particular existence where very existent is basically unique. When, however, these existents are presented to the conceptual mind (as opposed to the true nature of the mind, which is a member of the Transcendental existential Intelligible realm), the latter extracts from them certain ‘essential’ and ‘accidental’ qualities whereby it classifies them. This classification, although it certainly does not exist in the external world, is, nevertheless, warranted by it for the mind. That is to say, it is only an operation of the mind although not a fictional one:

The reality and being of the differentiae consists only in particular and unique existences of the essences, which are true individuals. What exists externally is, therefore, only [modes of] existence but, thanks to sense-perception, they give rise in the conceptual mind to certain general or specific notions (i.e. genuses and differentiae), some of which are attributed to their essence and others to their accidental qualities. The mind then attributes these existentially to these objects.[85]

It can be concluded from Sadrà’s discussion that in the reality, there is nothing but existence, and all essences our mind constitutes in the eidetic reduction are in fact the determinations (ta'ayyunàt) of existence and epiphanies of Being. Derived from the Transcendent method of the ontetic reduction, this idea is Sadrian turning point toward his illuminative existentialism on which all beings are only emanative entities manifested from Being – a specific theory of being on which Sadrà reconsiders the philosophical problems in general.

Notes:

[20]. See: This is obvious especially if we consider the practical, mystical aspect of this school. The phrase “khal' al-na'layn” used in their language indicates that we should give up in first instance our knowledge bracketing our ratio to freshly restart.

[21]. Descartes, Meditations, p. 17.

[22]. Ibid., pp. 23-44.

[23]. Phenomenological Movement, p. 77; See also: Pivcevic, E., Husserl and Phenomenology, pp.11-21, 34ff.

[24]. Cartesian Meditations, pp. 5-7.

[25]. See Husserl, E., Idea of Phenomenology, Lecture 2; also, Hammond, M. and Others, Understanding Phenomenology,(Oxford,1991) pp. 1-3; also, Kockelman, J.J., Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology, pp.118-127,137-9.

[26]. See Below in this paper.

[27]. See Sadrà , al-Asfàr, v. III.

[28]. Ibid., pp.62-3.

[29]. See Sadrà al-Asfàr, ‘Introduction’. This ideal is commonly reminded through the illuminative texts.

[30]. See al-Asfàr, v. I.

[31]. Farber, Basic Issues in Philosophy, New York, 1968, p. 116.

[32]. Compare these two senses with Heidegger’s first and third senses of essence as described in: Griedev, A., ‘What did Heidegger mean by ‘Essence’”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, v. 19, no.1, Jan.1988, pp. 64-89.

[33]. al-Asfàr, v. I, pp. 56-8, 243-5.

[34]. Ibid., 262-326.

[35]. Ibid., pp. 245ff, 75ff.

[36]. Ibid., 245-59; also v. III, pp. 275-77.

[37]. Ibid., v. I; v. II, pp. 35ff.

[38]. Ibid., v. I, pp.265-7.

[39]. For a discussion on Husserl see Kockelmans, op .cit., pp. 118-127, 206-327; also see: Phenomenological Movement, pp. 679ff. Of course it must be mentioned here that Sadrà also leads to a Hermeneutic science of higher apprehension or mystical consciousness ('Irfàn), however, it is not the same as Husserl’s Eidetic Science.

[40]. Sadrà, Mafàtíh, p. 139.

[41]. Ideas, p. 155.

[42]. See Mafatih, pp. 287-291 also al-Asfàr.

[43]. This is an evidence for philosopher before him has used Husserl’s saying (Crisis) that phenomenological method. For a discussion on this saying see Gorwich, A. Psychology and Phenomenology.

[44]. Husserl, Phenomenology in Encyclopedia Britannica.

[45]. That the phenomenological tendency lends itself to such a mystical interpretation is attested by the work of Edith Stein, Husserl’s student, in On the Problem of Empathy [The Hague, 1964] and by the opinions of other specialists on the subject. [See Farber, M., The Aims of Philosophy, NY,1966,p.11).

[46]. Husserl, Phenomenology.

[47]. Ideas, pp. 235-57, pp. 56-7, 156-67.

[48]. Ricoeur, Husserl, p.190.

[49]. See Kockelmans, op .cit., pp. 137-9.

[50]. Fink E., “I analyze intentionelle et le problem de la pense speculative” in Problemes Actuals de la Phenomenologie, ed. by H.L.Van Berda, Brussel 1952, p. 68; qouted in Farber, Naturalism and Subjectivism, p. 240.

[51]. Ideas, para.15.

[52]. Idea of Phenomenology, lecture 2.

[53]. Ideas, para. 15.

[54]. For a discussion on the Transcendent phenomenology and ontology see: Kockelmans, op .cit., pp. 246ff, esp. 254-7, 281 ff. Also see: Pivcevic, op .cit. pp. 102-111.

[55]. Farber, Naturalism, p. 240.

[56]. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 21.

[57]. “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (London 1993) p. 258.

[58]. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 20.

[59]. Ibid., p. 21.

[60]. Being and Time, 32.

[61]. Ibid.

[62]. Ibid., 34.

[63]. Ibid., 35.

[64]. See: Heidegger, M., The Question of Being, trans. J. T. Wild & W. Kluback (New Haven, 1958) esp. pp.74ff.

[65]. Farber, Naturalism, pp.240-1.

[66]. Being and Time, p. 63.

[67]. See Husserl’s Marginals, transcribed by Husserl Archives of Louvain, quoted by Farber, Naturalism, p. 364.

[68]. See: “What is Metaphysics?”, in Basic Writings, pp. 89-111.

[69]. Olafson maintains that in later Heidegger’s works, it is Being that grounds the presence (i.e. Dasein). See: his book Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind.

[70]. Being and Time, p. 19.

[71]. al-Asfàr, v. I, Part 1, Ch.1.

[72]. Heidegger, Basic Problems, ‘Introduction’.

[73]. al-Asfàr, v. I, Part 1.

[74]. al-Asfàr, v. 6. Compare Heidegger “Every being has a way-of-being” [Basic Problems, p.18].

[75]. Basic Problems p. 16.

[76]. Ibid., ‘introduction’, p. 19ff.

[77]. Ibid., p. 23.

[78]. The similarities between Heidegger and Sadrà does not prove that their aims of returning to Being is the same; Sadrà has a mystical aim in head, but Heidegger seems not definitely to have. On his relation to Mysticism see: Macquarrie, J., Heidegger and Christianity, (London 1994), pp.117-121.

[79]. al-Asfàr, I, pp. 263ff.

[80]. One can say here that Heideggerian de-construction is de-construction of subjectivism; if so it is similar to Sadrian task to de-construction of subjectivism; the difference is that Heidegger acts through analysis of history of western thought but Sadrà acts through analysis and rejection of the essentialism which according to him is the ideology if subjectivism.

[81]. al-Asfàr, v. I, p. 37.

[82]. Ibid., p. 103.

[83]. See: Ibid., v. I.

[84]. Ibid., v. II, p. 35.

[85]. Ibid., p. 36.

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A Reconstruction

Mahmoud Khatami

Notes:

References

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