Transcendent theosophy oral-hikmat al-muta’āliyah (حكمت متعاليه), the doctrine andphilosophy developed byPersian philosopherMulla Sadra (d.1635 CE), is one of two main disciplines ofIslamic philosophy that are currently live and active.[1]
The expressional-hikmat al-muta’āliyah comprises two terms:al-hikmat (meaning literally,wisdom; and technically,philosophy, and by contextual extensiontheosophy) andmuta’āliyah (meaningexalted ortranscendent). This school of Mulla Sadra in Islamic philosophy is usually called al-hikmat al-muta’āliyah. It is a most appropriate name for his school, not only for historical reasons, but also because the doctrines of Mulla Sadra are both hikmah or theosophy in its original sense and an intellectual vision of the transcendent which leads to the Transcendent Itself. So Mulla Sadra’s school is transcendent for both historical andmetaphysical reasons.
When Mulla Sadra talked about hikmah or theosophy in his words, he usually meant the transcendent philosophy. He gave many definitions to the term hikmah, the most famous one defining hikmah as a vehicle through which “man becomes an intelligible world resembling the objective world and similar to the order of universal existence”.[2]
Mulla Sadra's philosophy andontology is considered to be just as important to Islamic philosophy asMartin Heidegger's philosophy later was toWestern philosophy in the 20th century. Mulla Sadra brought "a new philosophical insight in dealing with the nature ofreality" and created "a major transition fromessentialism toexistentialism" in Islamic philosophy.[3]
A concept that lies at the heart of Mulla Sadra's philosophy is the idea of "existence precedes essence", a key foundational concept ofexistentialism. This was the opposite of the idea of "essence precedesexistence" previously supported byAvicenna and his school ofAvicennism[4] as well asShahab al-Din Suhrawardi and his school ofIlluminationism. Sayyid Jalal Ashtiyani later summarized Mulla Sadra's concept as follows:[5]
"The existent being that has an essence must then be caused and existence that is pure existence ... is therefore a Necessary Being."
For Mulla Sadra, "existence precedes the essence and is thus principle since something has to exist first and then have an essence." This is primarily the argument that lies at the heart of Mulla Sadra's philosophy.[6] Mulla Sadra substituted ametaphysics of existence for the traditional metaphysics of essences, and giving priorityAb initio to existence overquiddity.[7]
Mulla Sadra effected a revolution in the metaphysics of being by his thesis that there are no immutable essences, but that each essence is determined and variable according to the degree of intensity of its act of existence.[8]
In his view, reality is existence, in a variety of ways, and these different ways look to us like essences. What first affects us are things that exist and we form ideas of essences afterward, so existence precedes essence. This position referred to as primacy of existence (Arabic:Isalat al-Wujud).[9]
Mulla Sadra's existentialism is therefore fundamentally different from Western existentialism ofJean-Paul Sartre. Sartre said that human beings have no essence before their existence because, there is no Creator, no God. This is the meaning of "existence precedes essence" in Sartre's existentialism.[10]
Another central concept of Mulla Sadra's philosophy is the theory of "substantial motion" (al-harakat al-jawhariyyah), which is "based on the premise that everything in the order of nature, includingcelestial spheres, undergoes substantial change and transformation as a result of the self-flow (fayd) and penetration of being (sarayan al-wujud) which gives every concrete individual entity its share of being. In contrast toAristotle andIbn Sina who had accepted change only in fourcategories, i.e.,quantity (kamm),quality (kayf),position (wad’) andplace (‘ayn), Sadra defines change as an all-pervasivereality running through the entire cosmos including the category ofsubstance (jawhar)."[11]Heraclitus described a similar concept centuries earlier (Πάντα ῥεῖ - panta rhei - "everything is in a state of flux"), whileGottfried Leibniz described a similar concept a century after Mulla Sadra's work.[12]