Mulla Sadra, a 17th century Muslim sage, resemblance of his system to Whiteheads process philosophy

By: Louwrens Willem Hessel, Leiden, Netherlands

Introduction Of all the worlds religious systems Islam seems to be the furthest removed from Process Philosophy and theology. In this respect it is at the opposite end of Buddhism, of which its affinity to process thought has been noticed for a long time. Islam is usually characterised as static, rigid, inflexible. Of course it has not always been like that, but with the death of the great Al Ghazali (A.D. 1111) developments appear to have come to a dead end, at least in the major, Sunni branch of Islam. Even today the certainty of an unchanging revelation is the top value in Muslim universities. But development did not really stop; it shifted to the Shii branch of Islam and for a long time remained beyond the horizon of western philosophers. So at the same time that Descartes concluded that reality falls apart in two kinds of substances, each with its own adventures, but in themselves unchanging, and had to invoke God to keep his system from incoherence, there was this Muslim sage Mulla Sadra of Shiraz (died 1641) criticising the very concept of substance and replacing it by the idea that all reality is forever in a process of change. Not just moving, as atoms move in space, but changing internally. Changing into what he called ever higher levels of existence. Muslim philosophy is always under the suspicion that it is in fact theology, always under the spell of holy revelations in a holy book, invulnerable and immune against criticism. But such is not the case with Mulla Sadras philosophy. The basis of his thinking is human experience and although he uses verses from Koran and Hadith as illustrations and decorations (and sometimes as a display of orthodoxy, to save himself from persecution) he never appeals to them as proofs of the truth of what he was saying. The origin of his own highly original vision was neither Koran nor Hadith, but a series of mystic insights, or rather intellectual intuitions, experienced during the years of his forced seclusion, to which he was condemned by the religious establishment of his days. And far from appealing to these as a kind of privileged personal knowledge, he remained in discussion with the entire Islamic philosophical world and criticised it on rational, not religious, or mystic, grounds. Whitehead said that mysticism is a direct insight into depths as yet unspoken and that the purpose of philosophy is not to explain away but to rationalise mysticism and this is exactly what we see Mulla Sadra doing.

Substantive motion (haraka jauhariya) The key term of Sadras system is the idea of substantive motion or better transsubstantiation; it is the doctrine that the entire field of existence i.e. all things (he would call them grades of being) ceaselessly evolve into ever higher forms and that this happens by including and thereby transcending all lower, that is previous, ones. This is evolution two centuries before Darwin, without a visit to the Galapagos islands, and without the unaccountable haphazardness which is at the base of Western evolutionary doctrine. Even more striking is the similarity of his entire system to Whiteheads process philosophy. All existence is inexorably temporal as it moves from more general, indeterminate levels to more concrete, determinate and integrated, unitary forms, which in their turn further evolve into ever higher stages. Even God is not outside this universal movement. God exists, an to exist is a verb. It sounds like Whiteheads bold statement that even God must be in the grip of creativity. Whitehead describes his Actual Occasions as growing into existence by integrating prehensions of their actual worlds into ever new unities which in turn are prehended and taken up in subsequent events. The many become one and are increased by one, and the process of becoming one is from vague and less determinate to ever greater determinateness and concreteness. It is not the accidents but the substances themselves that change, or rather: perish and are reborn. Becoming rather than being is the pre-eminent character of existence. The process is all there is: a unitary actuality is everything (Mulla Sadras words). Apart from Actual Occasions there is nothing, nothing (Whiteheads words). Existence vs essence It is not only in their ontology but also in their convictions about the task of philosophy itself that the similarity is striking. It seems that Mulla Sadra has experienced a kind of conversion from the then current idea that philosophy has to do with finding the essences of things, to the direct experience of what he calls the overwhelming presence of existence. He then tried to express it for others, knowing full well that it can never be captured or explained by any number or combination of essences. Whiteheads words are: The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built up out of universals. The answer is: in no way. Philosophy must explain abstraction, not concreteness. He speaks of an instinctive grasp of ultimate truth: The sole appeal is to intuition. (It reminds and warns us of the Western trend to reduce God to a set of concepts and to reduce physics to physical laws plus initial conditions). What Mulla Sadra does is to make a new start: Not Platos unchanging ideas, neither Aristotles unchanging substances, nor Plotinus idea of timeless emanation, but real process is fundamental for all reality. Similar ideas in the West had to wait till the times of C.S.Peirce, William James, Henri Bergson.

If becomings are all, what is it that keeps the world together? There must be some activity that binds the units of becoming into an overall process. Mulla Sadra uses the word ilm, usually translated as knowledge, but in his more careful statements he says it is marifa, better translated as direct or intuitive knowledge. It is not an external relation between knower and known. but a form of existence in which the intellect and the intelligible become identical: attainment and possession are of the essence of knowledge and the knowable is the complete nature of the knower. Existing is knowing and knowing is interpenetration. The words are neoplatonic, but it is a neoplatonism that takes time seriously. The corresponding words in Whitehead are: to prehend and prehension, words to indicate the internal relationship between the growing actual entity and the facts of its actual world. One and yet many (tashkik) Mulla Sadra harmonises his doctrine of universal process with the doctrine of the unity of God (tauheed, main pillar of Muslim faith) by his concept of tashkik, which he describes as unity which by virtue of being one is many. He explains that this concept of unity is systematically ambiguous and that it applies to God and to everything which is truly existent but to nothing else. Reading his pronouncements one sees the image of a fountain which spurts forth an ever increasing multitude of jets in endless streams, for ever renewing itself, and yet remaining the same fountain. It seems as if many exegetes, Muslim as well as Western dont really believe that Mulla Sadra means what he says: that there is a true inner becoming and an ongoing and universal development. They translate tashkik by gradation, meaning intensification and diminution in existence, which masks its temporal aspect. This comes from Suhrawardi, an earlier mystic and philosopher for whom the unity of God had a static character, in accordance with traditional Muslim (and Christian) philosophy. Mulla Sadras vision is of a dynamic unity, of which the mathematical idea of unity is only an abstraction. It is a dynamised neoplatonism in which temporal coherence has taken the place of static unity. Universal knowledge of God For Mulla Sadra and for Whitehead novelty is a fundamental feature of the world and both recognise the Eternally One as its source. There is a universal intuitive knowledge of God in all of nature, from man down to even the seemingly lifeless events in inorganic nature. These are Mulla Sadras words. He speaks of low degrees of consciousness in all of subhuman nature. Whitehead has a separate word for this low degree of consciousness. It is mentality or mental feelings, which only in advanced creatures like man reach the level of consciousness. And even in man it is only in rare cases that consciousness of the Eternal One begins to dawn. It is comparable to ordinary

human sensation: only in rare cases are we conscious of our eyes, although without the eyes we would see nothing. Sadras thinking had its origin in a trans-conceptual vision of divine existence having this character of being one, such that by virtue of being one it is many. Now we seem far removed from Whitehead. Being one by giving birth to the many is like the mirror image of Whiteheads the many become one and are increased by one It is more like: The One gives rise to the many, and yet remains the One. The difference will be shown to be a contrast, rather than a contradiction. Eternal objects and God With Mulla Sadra there is no parallel of Whiteheads envisagement of Eternal Objects by God. Mulla Sadras ultimate is God Himself, rather than universal creativity, and it is not Eternal Objects that He envisages but it is Himself Whom He contemplates. This contemplation is not a state, but an act, and so the world is understood as a shining forth of the Divine Unity. Self-unfolding existence is another description, and when we look at it from our human situation it is called Breath of the Merciful. Mulla Sadra is certainly more poetical than Whitehead usually is. Yet, with this qualification in mind, there is a further parallel with Whiteheads concept of concrescence. The actual world from which Actual Occasions arise Mulla Sadra calls preparatory conditions, environment or context Whiteheads Eternal Objects are Sadras platonic forms, which in accordance with tradition he calls intelligences, and which become attributes of God. God as the only giver of existence in Sadra is comparable to the Primordial Nature of God who is the source of novelty and the enticer to definiteness in Whiteheads system. Thus Mulla Sadras doctrine of God issues into a concept of forms whereas for Whitehead the Eternal Objects necessitate a doctrine of God. Ultimates It is exactly at these points that Whitehead has been criticised for being incoherent. There is the category of the Ultimate, in which One, Many and Creativity form a coherent, dynamic trinity. But there are also Eternal Objects, which, although not actual, yet form a separate realm i.e. an infinite realm of possibilities, or pure potentiality. But the coherence of this entire realm of Eternal Objects with the three notions of the Ultimate is far from clear, and many interpreters of Whitehead regard the Eternal Objects as a kind of undue Platonism which they would like to eliminate. Once Eternal Objects have been introduced, Whitehead needs the notion of God as a principle of concretion to envisage this infinite realm of eternal possibilities and to arrange them into grades of relevance on behalf of temporal actual

occasions. There is a strong current in process thinking which regrets that process philosophy has thus come to be dominated by theologians, some of whom even say that there must be two ultimates: one philosophical, one religious. They point to a serious lack of evidence for such or any, conception of God, and they label their project as decentring Whitehead. For Mulla Sadra problems about Eternal Objects and the lack of evidence for the existence of God do not arise: there is only one Ultimate, and this is The One, from whom everything sprouts and to whom everything returns. It seems that Sadra never has doubted this doctrine, in the same way as Whitehead never has doubted the existence of Eternal Objects. The question is: can Mulla Sadra make his doctrine acceptable by generalising from human experience in the way Whitehead said he did for his metaphysics. Whiteheads usual approach is anthropological but in Religion in the Making we find this other route: metaphysics starting from religion, and there the outcome is quite remarkably close to Mulla Sadra. Rather than classifying the concept of God under the derivative notions as in Process and Reality we now find God as one of the three formative elements of the actual world, on the same level as Creativity and Eternal Objects. But his concept of God seems unstable. After finding that religious experience in general does not include direct intuition of a definite person or individual and saying that there is only a character of permanent and essential rightness in things, a completed ideal harmony which is God, at other places we find that God has a purpose (the attainment of value in the temporal world) and that it is a creative purpose. The book ends with a confession of faith that declares that three things survive the birth and decay of all imaginable types of order in the world: Eternal Objects, Creativity and God, upon whose wisdom all forms of order depend. The reason for the difference in outcome between these two approaches to metaphysics is not far to seek: religion springs from supernormal experiences of mankind in its moments of finest insight but a metaphysics based on such a direct intuition by special occasions must be shown to have universal validity if it should be metaphysics at all. Now we are again in the vicinity of Mulla Sadra who has the term prophesy for such intuitions and said that they cannot be doubted by the one who has experienced them. Mulla Sadras way of universalising them parallels Whiteheads criticism of Hume. He points out that there is a knowledge (intellectual intuition, marifa, see above) which is more basic and more reliable than our ordinary way of knowing by the senses (ilm). His entire life after his return to the community of man was dedicated to attempts to make these intuitions accessible to others. It is more like pointing at than like conceptualising. The whole enterprise stands in the context of the essence existence dichotomy which he had inherited from his predecessors. Reasoning depends on the use of essences or concepts, and

using essences freezes existence, which itself always flows. Essences are attempts to halt time. Along Whiteheads way we may point in the direction of further broadening the scope of prehension. We prehend more than what we are normally conscious of. We not only prehend states of affairs as they are for us here and now, but there are also direct prehensions of possibilities, not as inferences but as direct experience. It is the change from Humes sensationalism to a more adequate concept of experience. Maybe it can be further widened to a direct experience, of an overarching dynamic unity of all reality. Dynamic, because its unity expresses itself in our moral and aesthetic judgments. It would be a kind of cognizance by relatedness. Events whose characters are not discerned are yet known to exist by being signified by other events. Complementary cognizance by adjective would be restricted to special occasions and perhaps to special persons i.e. to what theologians would call personal revelations. By this move, if validated, Whiteheads system would remain centred. The alternative would imply that there is a spontaneous generation and a spontaneous disappearance of value. Not that value disappears with the perishing of each occasion, but when the network of occasions in the present epoch of the universe peters out all value will be gone. Whitehead said that in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true, in other words: how it functions is more important than its truth value. It leads to the question how philosophical pronouncements function in real life or, in this case, to a comparison of the moral implications of Mulla Sadras theologically oriented process philosophy with Whiteheads humanistic process philosophy, in its centred as well as in its decentred version. The answer depends on what we conceive as the character of the centre. That the centre is an immutable, omnipotent and emotionless Being has for a long time been standard orthodoxy in Christianity and in Islam. It would come as a relief that there is no evidence for such a centre. Whiteheads concept of God very explicitly does not have this character; His power is described as a tenderness which looses nothing that can be saved. For him the centre is not just a unity (whatever that may mean), but it is a personal unity with ths character, without which all value becomes trivial. In a less explicit way but very clearly there is a similar trait in Sadras thinking as when he points to the opening surah of the Koran speaking of The Compassionate, The Benificent, and when he openly goes against Muslim orthodoxy by pointing out the essential connection between the rise of Islamic tyrants and the then dominant Muslim conception of God as an arbitrary monarch, unbounded by reason.