Arabic philosophy

Muslim philosophers to reunite these various traditions, and it is

clear from the language he uses that Plato was the central hero of his

philosophy.13

Though there is much of the mythical in Suhraward¯ı’s account

of the history of philosophy, it deserves some consideration both

on historical and philosophical grounds. First some comments and

clarifications. The Ionian physicists are ignored, although they were

known to Muslimphilosophers through doxographies, Aristotle, and

the Galenic tradition. There are also no Christians or Muslims,

except for theS.

u¯ fı¯s, and these do not include the individuals usually

listed as the founding fathers of Islamic mysticism. The Persians

are not historical Zoroastrian priests but legendary Persian kings

and viziers, understood as sages. The connections to the Orientals –

Persians, Indians, and Chinese – are much vaguer than those to the

Greeks. As for the Greeks, Suhraward¯ı’s “divine philosophers” are

what the doxographers called “the Italian School.” The historical

Socrates and Plato obviously had connections to both the Ionians

and the Italians, but I think that Suhraward¯ı was correct to say that

Plato should be thought of primarily as a successor of Empedocles

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Suhraward¯ı 207

and Pythagoras rather than of Thales and the Ionians. Moreover, the

view that the Egyptian alchemists preserved a pre-Platonic philosophical

tradition that they passed on to the Muslims has recently

found a scholarly defender.14 Both the occult sciences and medicine

transmitted Greek thought to the Muslims in parallel to the translations

of Aristotle and other philosophers.15

Suhraward¯ı’s interest in his philosophical genealogy, its “Oriental”

connections, and many of its details are characteristic of the

whole Pythagorean/Platonic/Neoplatonic tradition. Plato, Porphyry,

Iamblichus, and Renaissance and early modern Neoplatonists like

Bruno were all interested in ancient wisdom, Oriental wisdom, and

particularly Egyptian wisdom. They were all interested in the allegorical

interpretation of classic texts. There was a consistent interest

in occult sciences and their practical application. Members of this

tradition believed that truth is primarily to be found in anintelligible

world, accessible to us only through some sort of intellectual or mystical

intuition and accessible only imperfectly. The product of such

intuition can be conveyed only through language that is symbolic to

one degree or another. The mythical systems of other peoples presumably

represent the intuitions of their sages. Ancient Egypt, with

its rich mythology and evocative hieroglyphs, exercised a unique

fascination.16

the nominalist intuition and the critique

of avicenna

The explanation that a philosopher gives of the universe and our

knowledge of it depends very much on how he is inclined to see the

world when he starts out; one is born a Platonist or Aristotelian, it is

said. For Suhraward¯ı the relevant fact is that the world stands present

to us as distinct manifest concrete things having particular qualities.

It may be that it is only after rigorous training that we learn to see

everything that is before us – he is a mystic, after all – but even our

knowledge of God and the metaphysical foundations of the universe

is not a matter of laborious construction and deduction but of learning

to see what is always before us. We see what is concrete, and it

is the concrete thing that is real, not the metaphysical ingredients

whose existence we might infer. Thus in metaphysics Suhraward¯ı

rejects realism with regard to universals, holding that everything

that exists is a particular; in this he may be compared to nominalists

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208 john walbridge

like Ockham. And in epistemology he holds that knowledge

consists in immediate awareness; in this he may be compared

to empiricists like Berkeley and Hume. Like the nominalists and

empiricists he is suspicious of metaphysical constructs and thus is

more zealous as a philosophical critic than as a constructor of systems.

Given the way that Suhraward¯ı has usually been portrayed,

these claims need to be defended.17

The place to start is where Suhraward¯ı himself claimed to have

started – with the doctrine that later came to be known as “knowledge

by presence.” The dominant epistemological theory among

Muslim philosophers of Suhraward¯ı’s time was that of Avicenna,

which in turn derived from the theory of cognition in Aristotle’s De

Anima. In this Peripatetic epistemology, as Suhraward¯ı would have

called it, our senses are affected by external stimuli. The resulting

forms are imprinted somehow in the sense organs and then are combined

in the brain and manipulated in various ways to produce the

objects of sensation and imagination. Objects of pure thought – the

concept of triangle, for example – cannot simply be imprinted in

the brain since any imprinted triangle must necessarily be the

image of some particular triangle with particular angles and sides

of particular length. Such abstract ideas must therefore be in the

immaterial mind, which has the capacity to become the idea of

triangle. The idea of triangle comes into being in the immaterial

intellect through the contemplation of the particular triangles presented

to it by the senses and the related material faculties of the

brain. The intellect is thus able to recognize the pure essences of

things in the material images presented to it by the senses and the

brain. These then become the raw materials of the sciences and real

knowledge.18

There are difficulties, however, as anyone who has wrestled with

Aristotle’s accounts of cognition can testify. The theory explains

how we know universals once we know them but not how we come

to know universals nor how we know particulars beyond the level of

sensation. The obvious problem is that the theory seems to require

that we can recognize the essences of natural kinds by inspection and

know immediately what those essences consist in. This is plausible

if we are talking about triangles, but Aristotle developed the theory

for natural science and biology. We should thus know that human

beings are rational animals by meeting various human beings and

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Suhraward¯ı 209

know by inspection that bats and horses belong to the same class,

mammals, but that bats and birds are in quite different classes. This

implausibility has always dogged the Peripatetic scientific project,

despite Aristotle’s attempt to address the problem in Posterior

Analytics, II.19. From an Islamic point of view the greater difficulty

is that we cannot have intellectual knowledge of particulars. We

know geometry as immaterialminds, but we know the things around

us as material beings, in the same way that animals do. We might

live with the implausibility of knowing the diagram in a geometry

book in a completely different way than we know the theorem illustrated,

but the theory also implies that God cannot know particulars.

Averroes responded that God knew things through their causes, but

this does not seem too convincing.19

Suhraward¯ı started over with the phenomenon of vision, the

noblest of the senses and the usual, if not always acknowledged,

starting point for theories of knowledge. There had been for centuries

two contradictory theories of vision – extramission and intromission.

In the one a cone went out from the eye and contacted the

objects of vision; in the other something came in from the things

seen and affected the eye. The former lent itself to mathematical

optics but was physically implausible. The latter was more plausible

physically, even if no one had quite worked out the details, but it

had mathematical problems. Both theories had difficulties explaining

how light made it possible to see things. (The theory of Ibn al-

Haytham, or Alhazen, which is more or less correct, was not yet

widely known.) Suhraward¯ı pointed out that both theories missed a

fundamental point, that we see things, not the images of things. We

see a large mountain that is far away, not a small image in the eye.

We see whiteness whether or not it is brightly illumined. Actually,

vision is simple, Suhraward¯ı tells us. It consists of a sound eye being

in the unveiled presence of something illumined. Light is simply that

which makes something manifest. Most important, vision requires a

self-aware being. The other senses are analogous. Obviously, a completely

worked out Illuminationist theory of vision would require

us to take account of the mechanics of perspective and the eye, but

Suhraward¯ı has made an important point, that the critical element in

sensation is that there is awareness by a conscious being of the thing

that is the object of sensation. That awareness is what distinguishes

a human being seeing from a movie camera.20

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210 john walbridge

He then extends this theory to knowledge in general. In the

famous dream, Aristotle had told him that the key to understanding

knowledge was self-knowledge. Knowledge, like vision, consists

in the unveiled presence of the object of knowledge before the selfaware

knower. Later Illuminationists refer to this as the unity of the

knower, knowledge, and object of knowledge, but this formulation

misses the point that I think is important – that knowledge is of

particular things that can be apprehended directly. Being a mystic,

Suhraward¯ı did not think that the objects of the senses were the only

things that could be apprehended. We can, with suitable training,

apprehend the immaterial beings – the angels and Platonic Forms.

Nevertheless, these too are particulars (on Forms as particulars, see

further below). The whole theory is nominalism of a thoroughly radical

sort.21

This nominalism is the basis for his attack on the Peripatetic theory

of essential definition. Aristotle, followed by his Islamic disciples,

had held that the essences of things are made known by essential

definitions, h.

udu¯ d in Arabic. Such definitions consist of the genus

plus the differentia – “man is a rational animal,” for example. Other

kinds of definitions might succeed in identifying a natural kind –

“man is a laughing biped” – but they do not make the essence known.

If we know the differentia, we effectively already know the thing, but

in practice we can never know whether we have exhausted the differentia

of a particular kind. Moreover, many Peripatetic definitions

turn out to be more obscure than what they define. “Black gathers

vision,” but, of course, anyone who can see knows what black is. If

he doesn’t, it can be pointed out to him. Since Aristotle andAvicenna

identify essential definition as the way by which concepts must be

conveyed, Suhraward¯ı concludes that the Peripatetics have made it

impossible to know anything.22

the metaphysics of illuminationist

neoplatonism

The ontological counterpart of Suhraward¯ı’s critique of Peripatetic

epistemology is the doctrine of i‘tiba¯ ra¯ t ‘aqliyya or beings of

reason.23 I‘tiba¯ r means taking something into account or considering

something. Beings of reason for Suhraward¯ı are those concepts

that result from themind’s contemplation of the thing, not from the

apprehension of the concrete qualities of the thing. If we say that a

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particular horse has four legs or is brown, these are concrete qualities,

properties that we meet in the actual horse in the real world.

However, if we say that the horse is existent, one, or contingent,

these are properties that have to do with how we think about the

real horse. When properties are made into nouns, brownness and

four-leggedness refer to something concrete while existence, unity,

and contingency do not – or, if they do, they all refer to the same

thing, the horse itself.24

The target of this analysis is, as usual, the Peripatetics. Avicenna

had made a distinction between the essence – or, more properly,

quiddity – of a thing and its existence. He pointed out that you could

ask two quite different questions about a thing: “Is it?” and “What

is it?” The first addressed its existence and the second its quiddity.25

The Aristotelian roots of this distinction are obvious, and it is clearly

a useful clarification of Aristotle, employing the distinction between

the Arabic participle and infinitive. The distinction is legitimate.

The difficulty is that Avicenna seems to assume that a real distinction

corresponds to the mental distinction, that if we can distinguish

the existence from the quiddity of a thing, the thing must contain

both existence and quiddity. The move is the more natural since it

reflects an Aristotelian tendency to explain things as combinations

of substrates and forms. There are difficulties. Bemused European

philosophers pointed out that the distinction implied that existence

was an accident.26 The problem, as Suhraward¯ı relentlessly points

out, is that it leads to insuperable problems of regression. One can

ask the same questions about the quiddity and the existence. Is there

a quiddity and existence of the existence and of the quiddity? What

about the existence of the existence of the existence? Similar arguments

can be made against the other beings of reason: unity, contingency,

necessity, and the like.

Suhraward¯ı gives a parallel critique of the Peripatetic doctrine of

hylomorphism, the theory that material bodies are compounds of

matter and form, with form being a composite of forms of different

kinds: species, accidents, elements, and qualities of various sorts.

Suhraward¯ı finds this all quite implausible and argues instead for

a simpler explanation, that bodies are just self-subsistent magnitude

and qualities. It is a theory that has its origins in Plato’s

Timaeus and reappears occasionally thereafter in the history of philosophy,

notably in Descartes. It is not particularly central to the

Illuminationist project, for the theory is abandoned by Suhraward¯ı’s

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212 john walbridge

commentator Qut.b al-D¯ın Sh¯ır ¯az¯ı, but it is characteristic of Suhraward

¯ı’s ontologically parsimonious critique of the Peripatetics.27

In modern times, Suhraward¯ı is best known for the metaphysics

of light that appears in the second book of The Philosophy of Illumination.

The relation of this system to the critique of the Peripatetics

in the first half of that book is reasonably clear: the Peripatetic

doctrines that he refutes concern the fundamental epistemological

and metaphysical issues where his new system differs from that of

Avicenna.28 It is less clear how the metaphysics of The Philosophy

of Illumination relates to his so-called Peripatetic works, some of

which were written at roughly the same time as this work. The usual

account is that these other works are intended for those incapable

of understanding the true Illuminationist philosophy and are therefore

of at best limited significance for understanding Suhraward¯ı’s

thought. I aminclined to doubt it, since his later followers seem to

have made no such distinction, but the solution waits on serious

study of Suhraward¯ı’s other philosophical works.

Whatever may be the relation of the second part of The Philosophy

of Illumination to his other work, its philosophical doctrine

is reasonably clear with careful reading and the advice of the early

commentators.29 Suhraward¯ı begins by identifying his fundamental

concepts: light and darkness, independent and dependent. Light, he

explains, is the most self-evident of entities, “that which is manifest

in itself and manifests others,” says one of the commentators, citing

a well-known definition of light.30 The independent entity is that

whose existence or perfections do not rest upon another. Darkness

and the dependent are the opposite. Moreover, light and darkness can

be either self-subsistent or in another. This corresponds to a distinction

that he made earlier between substance, that whose existence

is not diffused throughout another, and states, which exist diffused

throughout another. These distinctions yield four classes of entities:

(1) Self-subsistent or immaterial lights, which the commentators

identify with intellects.

(2) Barriers or substantial darknesses, which are bodies.

(3) Accidental lights, which are physical light and various other

self-manifesting accidents.

(4)Dark accidents, those properties that are not manifest in

themselves.

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Everything that exists falls into one of these four classes. Light is

active; darkness, whether substantial or accidental, is passive.

(1) Immaterial lights are intellects orminds. The key concept here

is “self-evident” or “manifest.” Immaterial lights are manifest both

to other things, like all light, and to themselves, which is to say

that they are self-aware and aware of other things. Therefore, anything

that is alive must be an immaterial light. They are, we must be

clear, lights, not light. Suhraward¯ı is not thinking of a substratum of

luminous matter or chunks of light that are emitted from something

luminous, cross the intervening space, and fall on something else. He

is thinking of distinct luminous individual incorporeal things whose

essence is tobemanifest. They are more likeLeibnizian monads than

like the undifferentiated primal reality of existence that we find in

some later philosophers like Mull¯a S. adr¯a and Sabziw¯ar¯ı. They are

individualized by differences in intensity and by luminous and dark

accidents; Suhraward¯ı has earlier argued that things can differ by the

intensity of their being. If they are above a certain level of intensity,

their ability to manifest other things includes the ability to bring

other things into being and to sustain their existence. His concept

of immaterial light can be identified with the ordinary Peripatetic

concept of intellect but with two new features: first, if immaterial

lights are sufficiently intense, they can create, and, second, they are

manifest to other immaterial lights, so that we can, in principle, see

God and the celestial intellects/lights. (2) Dark barriers or bodies are

more or less the opposite. They are neither manifest in themselves,

nor do they manifest another. Therefore, they can be seen only with

the aid of accidental light and be known only by incorporeal lights,

and they are alive only insofar as they are associated with an incorporeal

light. They are passive, not active, so that both their activities

and they themselves are the effects of lights. (3) Accidental lights are

physical lights and the luminous accidents that occur in both barriers

and in immaterial lights. Like immaterial lights, accidental lights are

manifest and manifest other things, but since they subsist in something

else, they are not self-aware or alive. (4) Dark accidents are the

qualities of physical things that are not manifest in themselves, as

well as certain states in immaterial lights.

All these entities are connected through illumination and their

presence to each other. The immaterial lights must be causally primary,

since an accident in itself cannot be the cause of a substance

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214 john walbridge

nor can a passive darkness be the cause of light with its activity. The

more intense immaterial lights can be the efficient and sustaining

causes of other immaterial lights less intense than themselves. They

can also be the cause of both luminous and dark accidents in lower

lights due to the lower light’s contemplation respectively of the luminosity

of the higher light and its own relation of dependence. Thus,

immaterial lights can differ in intensity and in luminous and dark

accidents. Finally, the immaterial lights can be the cause of barriers,

bodies, through their aspect of dependence on another. The immaterial

lights are also the ultimate cause of the luminous accidents

in physical bodies – which is to say, physical light – as well as their

dark accidents. If we work our way up this causal chain of entities

we reach first immaterial lights and finally an immaterial light that

is not caused by another immaterial light, the Light of Lights or God.

From this set of entities and relationships, Suhraward¯ı derives his

cosmology. First – in an ontological, not a temporal sense – there is

the Light of Lights. Its illumination results in another immaterial

light, and this second light’s illumination results in a third immaterial

light. Suhraward¯ı calls this the vertical order of lights. At some

point, there is a double effect, both an immaterial light resulting

from the luminosity of the higher light and a material sphere resulting

from its dependence on and separation from the Light of Lights.

This is the outer sphere of the universe. At each step down from here,

there is another immaterial light and another sphere. At some point,

there also begin to be material lights associated with the spheres.

Moreover, immaterial lights begin to multiply on the lower levels