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The nature and significance of the philosophy of Mulla Sadra cannot be fully understood by those who approach it as if there had been nothing before it. When he himself began to teach philosophy, Mulla Sadra was well aware of the general context i.e. Islamic philosophy in which his own work was necessarily going to be done. To attempt to bring out the meaning of this philosophy would be to commit oneself to the production of some proof of its existence-or to the admission that it never existed. Here, however, I found myself face to face with the same kind of difficulty although on another plane; for if the existence of a philosophy in the Islamic world has been denied, the very idea of an Islamic philosophy has been held to be impossible. It will be found, then, this book converges to this conclusion: that Islamic civilization pro¬duced, besides Islamic literature and art as everyone admits this very Islamic philosophy which is a matter of dispute. No one, of course, maintains that Islamic philosophy was created out of nothing, nor yet that all philosophy in Islamic world was Islamic-just, as no one maintains that Islamic literature and art were created out of nothing or were wholly Islamic.
The word Islamic philosophy does not belong to the philosophy of Mulla Sadra, but it is the name under which, in his Asfar, Mulla Sadra designated the doctrine of the Common Doctor of revealed teachings in Qur’an and Hadith. Such as it is described in this text, Islamic philosophy is that way of phi¬losophizing in which the Islamic faith and the human intellect join forces in a common investigation of philosophical truth. The study and the teaching of Islamic philosophy are both beset with many difficulties. First of all, in the form it has been given by Mulla Sadra, it presupposes for its understanding an elementary knowl¬edge of the philosophy of Aristotle. The study of the Philosopher takes time, and when the moment comes for the student to tackle the doctrine of Mulla Sadra himself he still needs to be trained in the art of uniting the light of faith and the light of the intellect.
Another difficulty arises from the philosophical method followed by Mulla Sadra in those very works in which his own philosophical views are found in their purity, namely, Asfar and the long series. As a philosopher, Mulla Sadra felt perfectly free to draw arguments from many and diverse philosophies and to confirm his conclusions by means of all sorts of reasons whose very multiplicity is liable to embarrass beginners. This complex situation is the problem to which the present book seeks to bring, if not a solution, at least a working introduction. Such is: first and foremost, the specific nature of the way in which we use philosophy according to the view of Mulla Sadra; second, the notion of being, including the consequences it entails for the doctrine of the transcendental; last, not least, the impact of this same notion on the many philosophical problems in whose data it is included -God, substance, efficient causality, creation, the structure of finite being, the nature and unity of man, the soul, the human intellect and its object. These and other key notions are so many basic doctrines that need to be correctly understood before the student attempts to face the colossal array of particular questions and answers, objections and re¬plies, that make up the body of the Islamic philosophy of Mulla Sadra.
To a man of the third century in Islamic world, what did the term "philosopher" mean? A philosopher was a man who, born before Islam, could not have been informed of the truth of Islamic Revelation. Such was the situation of Alfarabi, Avicenna, Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra. Wisdom and knowledge are here directed primarily towards knowing divine things and employed to teach them. It is however our intention to prove Islamic philosophy’s existence by showing in what it consists, leaving to those who would like to undertake it, the task of demonstrating where, before Mulla Sadra, the same doctrinal synthesis is to be found. From this point of view, however, all the philosophical statements of Mulla Sadra no longer present themselves on the same plane. What he has borrowed now becomes less important than what he has been able to do with this borrowed material. The parts of his philosophy in which Mulla Sadra shows the most originality, are in general included within his religious teachings. Far from pre¬tending to give an account of his philosophy without drawing freely upon his theological works, it is often in these latter that we shall find the definitive formula of his thought relative to the nature of being, the existence of God and His attributes, creation, the nature of man and the rules of the moral life.
According to him, the philosopher considers the nature of things as they are in themselves as considers them in their rela¬tion to God conceived as being both their origin and their end. From this point of view, every conclusion concerning God himself, or the re¬lations of being to God, is philosophical in its own right. Some of these conclusions presuppose an act of faith in the divine revelation, but some of them do not. The only difference is that, since these do not presuppose faith, they can be ex¬tracted from their theological context and judged, from the point of view of natural reason, as purely philosophical conclusions. This is an extremely important point in that it enables us to understand how strictly metaphysical knowledge can be included within a theological structure without losing its purely philosophical nature. According to some of his modern interpreters, Mulla Sadra thought of himself as a philosopher who was not anxious to compromise the purity of his philosophy by admitting into it the slightest mixture of Islamic teachings.
For Mulla Sadra the problem was rather different. It was a question of how to integrate philosophy into sacred science, not only without allowing either the one or the other to suffer essentially thereby, but to the greater benefit of both. In order to achieve this result, he had to integrate a science of reason with a science of revelation without cor¬rupting at the same time both the purity of reason and the purity of revelation. This problem did not arise for the first time in the work of Mulla Sadra. Other Islamic philosophers before him had discharged into sacred stud¬ies a considerable body of philosophical doctrine. Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi, were of these. What characterizes Mulla Sadra and gives him a special place in this general movement is precisely the intellectual effort he made to introduce this human learning into Shi’i teachings, without disturbing its unity.
If we adhere to the obvious meaning of the term, the "revealable" is whatever can be revealed. Ingenious exegeses have tried to show that the word "revealable" came from the word "revealed." This is true; but let us adds that in Islamic thought, there is some of the revealable which has been revealed, although it might well not have been, and there is some of the revealable which might well have been revealed but has not been. In order to preserve due respect for the complexity of this problem, we submit that it would be extremely imprudent to draw up a priori, without careful consultation of the texts of Mulla Sadra himself, a list of the revealable truths which God has or has not revealed. Let us ask Islamic philosophers whether the distinction between es¬sence and existence is a truth deriving from natural knowledge or a revealed truth, and most of them will reply that it is from natural knowledge and pertains directly to philosophy. They are right. Never¬theless, Mulla Sadra is of the opinion that God revealed this philosophic truth. Taken in itself, revelation is an act which, like every act, has a cer¬tain end in view. This end, for revelation, is God, who is infinitely beyond the limits of man's knowledge. If man was to attain his salva¬tion, God had to reveal to him knowledge beyond the limits of reason. The whole body of this knowledge is called sacred teaching. Our problem is to know what is the content of this body of sacred teachings.
What then are we to understand to be the object of metaphysics? The object proper to wisdom, first philosophy, is therefore the end of the universe. And, since the end of an object becomes one with its principle or its cause, we find Aristotle giving this definition: first philosophy studies first causes. Let us now ask what is the first cause or last end of the universe. The last end of anything is clearly what its primary author intended when he made it, or what its first mover intends in moving it. Now we shall see that the first author and first mover of the universe is Intelli¬gence. The end which He puts before Himself in creating and moving the universe ought therefore to be the end or good of the intelligence, that is, truth. Thus truth is the last end of the whole universe; and since the object of first philosophy is the last end of the whole universe, it follows that its proper object is truth. But we must here avoid a possible confusion. Since the philosopher is to attain the last end and, consequently, the first cause of the universe, the truth we speak of here cannot be any truth. A truth which is the source of all truth can only be found in a being that is the first source of all being.
The detailed study of Mulla Sadra really has no end, but this fact is one of the charms of a life spent in the company of the Common Doctor of Islamic teachings. Something new is always there to be learned from him. The real danger is that the student may spend years pondering Mulla Sadra's doctrine without realizing that he has not yet even begun to grasp its meaning. This is bound to happen every time the student misses the only true gateway there is to the proper understanding of Transcendent philosophy, namely, a certain metaphysical notion of being tied up with a certain notion of Islamic God. To describe these two notions, and to show them at work in a small number of capital problems, such has been our main concern in writing the present book.
This is, in brief, the theoretical basis of the Sadrian metaphysics contained in this book. It has been written with the express purpose of explaining certain basic aspects of Islam philosophy and widely discussed issues. It seeks to render a service to all those Westerners genuinely interested in understanding Islamic philosophy. Needless to say, in a single book of this size it is not possible to deal with all the relevant issues, but I have sought to deal at least with the most significant ones in an effort to open an intellectual space for mutual understanding.
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