Review of Cécile Bonmariage's 'Le réel et les réalités: Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī et la structure de la réalité'

The history of ideas is punctuated with philosophers who attempted to grapple with questions which were often considered to
be perennial. One of the most significant of these was how to reconcile one’s desire for a totalising monistic account of reality
with one’s phenomenal experience of pluralism, namely the problem of the One and the many. This question had a venerable
tradition in the ancient and medieval trajectories of philosophy and was a major source of intellectual inspiration for
philosophers and mystics in Islam. Broadly speaking within Islamic intellectual tradition, pluralism was seen as being
championed by the modified peripateticism of Avicenna and monism promoted by the Sufi school of Ibn ʿArabī. A number of
thinkers in the later period, especially from around the fifteenth century attempted a reconciliation of monism and pluralism
beginning with the Shiraz philosophers Jalāl al-Dīn Dawānī (d. 1502) and Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Dashtakī (d. 1498) and
their students. The eminent philosopher who attempted this synthesis as a means towards a new method and meta-
philosophical and a ‘transcendent’ conception of philosophical inquiry, which he named ‘al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya’ in homage to
the Peripatetic Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 1274) and Akbarian Sufi Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī (d. 1350), was Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī
(d. c. 1635), popularly known as Mullā Ṣadrā.

Bonmariage's monographic study of this issue in the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā is a revised version of her doctoral dissertation
at the Catholic University of Louvain, supervised by Yahya Michot and Jules Janssens. The publication comprises in one
volume the academic study and a selection of key passages translated from the work of Mullā Ṣadrā. This second part includes
thirty-six texts chosen from his two major philosophical works al-Ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya fī-l-asfār al-ʿaqliyya al-arbaʿa (commonly
called Asfār), and its epitome al-Shawāhid al-rubūbiyya fī-l-manāhij al-sulūkiyya. These are organised under three headings: on
being, on the Necessary Being and the deployment of being from it, and the relationship between the Necessary and the
contingent. The translations are good and well-supported by footnotes which refer the reader to relevant passages in other
works by Mullā Ṣadrā, to works in the Peripatetic tradition that influence or contrast with the passages (such as works by
Avicenna, his student Bahmanyār and al-Ṭūsī), to the Neoplatonic tradition exemplified in the pseudo-Aristotelian/Plotinian
Theology of Aristotle, works of the Illuminationist tradition, and to the Sufis school of Ibn ʿArabī. What is clear from these
selections, and this is confirmed in the analytical first part of the book, is that Bonmariage attempts to explain Mullā Ṣadrā
primarily in terms of the Avicennan tradition. This is not surprising. Avicenna remains the most important figure in Islamic
intellectual history and it is constantly with respect to his work that subsequent philosophers comment, object, refine, criticise
and condemn. Mullā Ṣadrā’s work is an engagement with the history of Islamic philosophical traditions in which he deals
dialogically with the major thinkers of the traditions, especially Avicenna. The extensive nature of the relationship between
Avicenna and Mullā Ṣadrā still requires further investigation although a number of scholars (Ibrāhīmī Dīnānī, Saʿīd Raḥīmiyān,
Jules Janssens, Yahya Michot among others) have written about it.

Bonmariage’s argument concerns the notion of tashkīk al-wujūd in the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā, a notion that she translates
as the modulated singularity of being. The translation of ‘modulation’ seems to be drawn from Yahya Bonaud’s Paris
dissertation on the philosophy and mysticism of Khomeini. Being for Mullā Ṣadrā is a singular reality (following the Akbarian
theory of the oneness of being or waḥdat al-wujūd), but it comprises the Avicennan regard for plurality through undergoing
gradation and degrees, in itself also an indication of a Neoplatonic synthesis of the one and the many. That being admits of
degrees was a common position in Platonic traditions.

The analytical part comprises three sections: preliminaries on his biography, influences and the nature of ḥikma mutaʿāliya, the
fundamental aspects of Sadrian ontology (namely, the three doctrines of the self-evident nature of being, the ontological
priority of being over essence, and the modulated and singular nature of being), and the structure of the Real and of reality, the
critical examination of the nature of God and his bestowal of being upon all that is other-than-God. The theological
implications of such philosophy are clear. Ever since Avicenna, philosophers have sought to incorporate theological questions
in their inquiry and claimed that their demonstrative methods of examining questions about the nature of God, for instance,
are more effective and conclusive than kalām arguments. Thus the question of being for Mullā Ṣadrā is not extricable from the
question of the nature of God and his relationship with the world. Bonmariage’s method of analysis is deeply textual; positions
and arguments are well-supported with reference to the works of Mullā Ṣadrā and to those who influenced him. This is
refreshing change from some who work on Islamic intellectual history and pronounce on elements of thought with any
reference to the relevant texts that may substantiate their claims. The Sadrian conception of philosophy is textured and
comprises a tasting of reality, a deep meditation on scripture and the notion of a Prophetic inheritance of wisdom, as well as
the Greek heritage of Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists. Pierre Hadot’s insight into the nature of philosophy as care for the
self and as a spiritual exercise and commitment to a way of life is extremely useful for understanding Mullā Ṣadrā, and perhaps
Bonmariage should have indicated this wider context for explanation. The main analytical chapters require a more substantial
introduction to the nature of philosophy and the impacts of influences on Mullā Ṣadrā.

The chapters on Sadrian ontology are careful historical reconstructions of the development of key notions like being, the
doctrine of its ontological priority and rehearsal of the main arguments about tashkīk. The ontological priority of being (aṣālat
al-wujūd) demonstrates Mullā Ṣadrā’s critique of the Illuminationist tradition and a refutation of Suhrawardī’s argument
against existence having reference. It also indicates the shifts in his own understanding from an early period, when under the
influence of his teacher Mīr Dāmād (d. 1631) he was an essentialist, to a shift towards a monistic understanding that focuses
upon being as ontologically prior. Bonmariage rightly traces the history of the notion of tashkīk to the Neoplatonic
commentaries on Aristotle particularly on the Categories and relates the notion to the ancient tertium quid, and to kalām
arguments about discourse concerning God and contingents, as well as the idea of modulation of lights in the Illuminationist
tradition. However, the Sadrian notion is richer than such a logical concept. The concept for Mullā Ṣadrā entails and reflects an
ontological commitment to a particular vision of reality. It is not mere semantics.

The presentation of the Necessary Being includes a discussion of his arguments for the existence of God, including the famous
‘proof of the veracious’ (burhān al-ṣiddīqīn) and engages extensively with the kalām tradition. It also shows how Mullā Ṣadrā
draws on the Ibn ʿArabī’s tradition’s formulation of the three modes of being and how being is deployed, disclosed and
emanated from the One. A key mode in which the One relates to the many is epistemological. Bonmariage does not remark
that the discussion of divine knowledge was central to arguments for God’s existence in the theological tradition of
commentaries and super-commentaries on al-Ṭūsī’s famous work Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād and hence it influenced this line of
argumentation in Mullā Ṣadrā’s work. The real question with respect to contingents regards in what sense they can be said to
exist. Rahman’s position was that monism dominates and the unreality of particular existences means that tashkīk fails to
provide an adequate reconciliation of monism and pluralism. The affirmation of human will and the rejection of theological
and Avicennan determinism implies that Mullā Ṣadrā’s commitment to the reality of contingents is not merely a conventional
genuflection to a synthesis. The Sadrian formulation is paradoxical but multiplicity is confirmed under the rubric of unity. This
is better understood through a Neoplatonic paradigm in which the logical and metaphysics of unity and multiplicity are akin to
the Sadrian reconciliation. Of course, the final question is whether it works. How does a reader overcome the apparent
contradictions in the work? This is where one returns to the cultural question of the conception and role of philosophy which
is not a straightforward ratiocinative and discursive exercise but a commitment to cognising reality through reason, inspiration
and intuition. It is ultimately rather difficult to both verify and confirm the Sadrian vision. But the creativity of the approach
and the strong rejection of rehearsing positions needs to be adhered. Bonmariage has little to say about the legacy of Mullā
Ṣadrā. His dominance of the intellectual life of the Shiʿi seminary in Iran is clear. But a more engaged and critical approach to
his work and to his ontology is still requires. Tashkīk in this way is not merely a modulated approach to reality as such but is
also an equivocation and suspension of a simple binary and discursive hermeneutics of the text.

Bonmariage’s book is a successful historical and analytical exposition of this key ontological position of Mullā Ṣadrā. It deserves
to be read and to push people to engage with the later traditions of Islamic philosophy. One feels that it would have been
improved by a more careful contextualisation of his thought and a consideration of the wider legacy of Sadrian thought which
continues to resonate today.

http://mullasadra.blogspot.com/2009/10/assessing-recent-book-on-mulla-sadra-by.html