Traditions of Self-Knowledge from Socrates to Suhrawardi

Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Department of Classical Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Shihab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash ibn Amirak Abu 'l-Futuh al-Suhrawardi, or

Suhrawardi al-Maqtul was born in 1154 in Iran and moved to Aleppo in 1183. He was

executed in 1191 by Salah al-Din, on charges of corrupting the religion. Despite his early

death at the tender age of 38, Suhrawardi’s output and influence were prodigious as he is

known as the founder of the Ishraqi (or Illuminationist) school of Islamic philosophy,

which still has living branches today in Iran. Suhrawardi’s great Arabic work, The

Philosophy of Illumination, or Hikmat al Ishraq, purports to be an exposition of what he

calls, the science of lights (‘ilm al anwar), based on the intuition of the teacher and

master of philosophy (the dhawq imam al hokma wa rais) Plato. In his Introduction to the

treatise, Suhrawardi traces the lineage of Plato’s philosophy back to Empedocles and

Pythagoras, and ultimately to Hermes, and mentions the Eastern doctrine of light and

darkness (qa’adatu al sharq fi al nur wa al thalam)—taught by the Persian philosophers,

Jamasp, Frashostar, and Bozorgmehr—all semi-legendary sages associated with early

Zoroastrians. In the author’s introduction to the treatise we are told, “who ever wishes to

learn only discursive philosophy, let him follow the method of the Peripatetics”

(Suhrawardi 1999:4).1 Thus Suhrawardi’s topic in the treatise is the meaning of Platonic

1
al-Suhrawardi, 1999. The Philosophy of Illumination. Translated by John Walbridgde and

Hossein Zia. Provo.

intuitive wisdom, or Dhawq, which he contrasts with Peripatetic philosophy, and

specifically with the Aristotelian idea of essentialist definition.

For Suhrawardi, the fundamental difference between Platonist approaches to

knowledge versus Aristotelian methods lies in what he calls, ‘knowing by presence,’

(huduri). In invoking the idea of knowledge by presence, Suhrawardi primarily refers to

self-knowledge and specifically a form of self-knowledge that is non-representational.

Self-knowledge does not refer to knowledge that one has about the self—such as its place

in the universe, or knowledge of first person states, or of subjective states. Instead,

Suhrawardi is interested in the way that knowledge by presence can discover the human

soul's essence as that which knows itself; as such, this essence cannot be characterized by

any other attributes. Suhrawardi founds his philosophical project on the nature of self as

pure awareness, and only from that point constructs an epistemology and metaphysics.

In this paper, I examine the possible Platonist sources for Suhrawardi’s doctrine of

knowledge by presence and his critique of essentialist definition. In the conclusion to this

paper, I survey some familiar texts of Plato that emphasize the primacy of self-knowledge

as the initiation point of Platonic philosophy, including the First Alcibiades, the Apology

and Charmides. I conclude that Plato uses Socratic conversations in order to mark this

special form of non-intentional self-awareness as foundational to his own philosophical

enterprise, that is, to show that wisdom must be grounded in knowledge of the self. In

studying Suhrawardi’s critique of essentialist philosophy and his exposition of intuitive

knowledge, a fruitful method for deepening our conception of Platonic self-knowledge

emerges, despite that Suhrawardi’s sources are likely to be Neoplatonic rather than

Platonic.
 In the Introduction to his exposition of this method in the Hikmat al Ishraq,

Suhrawardi refers us to another of his works, the Intimations, or al Talwihat, which he

says treats of Peripatetic philosophy. There he recounts his struggle with the meaning of

knowledge. Suhrawardi tells us that he had a dream or rather a vision in which Aristotle

appeared to him, and Suhrawardi asked Aristotle, “what is knowledge?” (Ma s’alat al

‘ilm) Aristotle answers: "consult yourself and it will be solved for you." Suhrawardi then

asks Aristotle, “how is that” and Aristotle replies,

"When you apprehend your self, is your apprehension of

your essence by your essence or by something else? If the
latter, then you would either have another faculty or else an
essence apprehending your essence, but either would result
in an absurd regression.” 2
Suhrawardi recounts this vision as a key for understanding his epistemological

principle, which is grounded entirely in the possibility, or rather, the inevitability of self-

knowledge, and the attendant definition of the self as self-evident light, the light of the

absolute, indeed, as a modality, at root one with the first light, which is God. Suhrawardi

devotes 2.1 in his major metaphysical work, the Hikmat al Ishraq, to the topic of self-

knowledge and self-definition. Let us glance briefly at the structure of the argument

employed there.3 He begins with a definition of the self-evident.

Anything in existence that requires no definition or

explanation is evident. Since there is nothing more evident
than light, there is nothing less in need of definition.
(2.107)

2
Walbridge, J. 2000. Leaven of the Ancients, Albany. Appendix II.
3
For discussions of this structure, see Amin Razavi, M. “How Ibn Sinian is Suhrawardi’s
Theory of Knowledge,” in Philosophy East and West Volume 53, number 2, April 2003
203-214. See also Ziai, H. 1990, Knowledge and Illumination, Brown Judaic Studies no.
97,150-155.
 Suhrawardi’s exposition of self-knowledge as primary knowledge occurs within the

context of a critique of Peripatetic essentialist definition. The first part of the treatise is

devoted to showing that the Aristotelian idea of definition is defective as a foundation for

knowledge, since such definition is dependent on something that is prior to definition, for

Suhrawardi on what is self-evident, but for Aristotle, on the first principles--which must

be intuited. We shall return to the nature and details of this critique later in the paper, but

even in the introduction to his treatise, Suhrawardi insists upon the uselessness of the

essential definition, the species formula that consists in the unity of the genus and

differentia, as a foundation for knowledge: if the hearer knows the genus and differentia,

he knows the definition already, whereas if he does not know them, the definition will

fail to convey the essence of the thing (Suhrawardi 1999: 10).

In section 114 Suhrawardi uses this definition of light as the self-evident to make the

ontological point that whatever perceives its own essence is a pure light, and every pure

light is evident to itself and apprehends its own essence. This theory of knowledge by

way of self-evidence is closely related to the Neoplatonist idea of the soul’s reversion on

itself, as we find it in Proclus, Elements of Theology, Proposition 16: “all that is capable

of reverting upon itself has an existence separable from body.”

By way of argument for his definition, Suhrawardi adduces as evidence, that, “you are

never unconscious of your essence,” in the terms of an argument per absurdum: suppose

you are able to be unconscious of your essence. In that case, your nature is not self-

evident. But if it is not self-evident, then what will make the self evident? If something

else makes the self evident, then that other is the self. There can be no pointing to

awareness without that awareness being present to be aware of the pointing. Nothing else
can know my nature if I am not aware of my nature, since that nature, as the self-evident,

could never be self-evident to anything else. Thus, it is only to me that my nature, the

self-evident, can be self-evident: only I can know that I know, or be aware that I am

aware.

At the same time, there is no way to represent this awareness in terms of any attribute

that it might possess—the nature of the self is simply awareness, with nothing else added.

This perhaps is the shocking feature of Suhrawardi’s definition of the self. He says that

the self is pure light and has no other nature, no other states, no other properties. Why is

it that there is no content for the self, other than awareness? Any content, any

representation, attribute, or state that belonged to the self, of which the self could be

aware, would no longer that which is aware, but only what it is aware of. Thus

Suhrawardi contrasts the “I” with the “It:”

A thing that exists in itself and is conscious of itself does

not know itself through a representation of itself appearing
in itself. This is because if, in knowing one’s self, one were
to make a representation of oneself, since this
representation of his Iness (ana iyyah) could never be the
reality of that Iness, it would be then such that that
representation is it (huwa) in relation to the Iness and not I.
It thus follows…that the apprehension of the reality of
Iness would be exactly the apprehension of what is not I-
ness. This is an absurdity. (Suhrawardi 115)
This key pointer that the self is that which is aware also carries the negative corollary,

that the self can never be represented as anything, nor can it be anything at all other than

that which apprehends its own essence:

If you examine this matter closely, you will find that that
by which you are you is only a thing that apprehends its
own essence—your ana’iyyatuh. (Suhrawardi 116)
Here Suhrawardi employs an argument from the distinction between essence and

accident: were there something beyond consciousness or awareness, it would be unknown

and would not belong to your essence, whose awareness is not superadded to it. Hence

there is no other property in addition to your essence of which being evident could be a

state.

To summarize, then, Suhrawardi begins his treatise by looking for a foundation for

wisdom, hikma, and finds that it must be grounded in what is self-evident. But what is

self-evident must be immediately knowable to that which knows it. It cannot be self-

evident to another, if that other is something distinct from that which is known. If the

self-evident is not evident to itself something else will make it self-evident. But then, it

will no longer be self-evident.

Suhrawardi’s system of metaphysics follows directly from this definition of the self as

incorporeal light: all living beings are such incorporeal lights and the nature of Life just

is equivalent to a thing’s being evident to itself—again evoking proposition 16 of the

Elements. For Suhrawardi, light in itself varies only by intensity or perfection with one

light being relatively poor in relation to its superior and relatively rich (gani) in relation

to its inferior, although all such lights express the same essential nature. In fact, the

incorporeal lights cannot differ in their reality or essence. Were their realities to differ,

there would be something else other than luminosity in each incorporeal light. And yet,

anything other than this luminosity could not belong to, but would be external to this

incorporeal light.

Moreover the incorporeal light can only be one: since any such lights cannot differ in

their reality, they cannot not be distinguished from each other by something they have in

common, or by something that they do not have in common. Since, as we have seen, an

incorporeal light has no condition other than light, it cannot in itself be distinct from
another. Nor can it acquire any external properties, since then it would be something

other than self-evident. Anything not self-evident would no longer be it. For this reason,

all incorporeal lights, all selves, must be one self:

When you have made a careful inquiry into yourself, you

will find out that you are made of ‘yourself’ that is, nothing
but that which knows its own reality. This is your own
Iness (anaiyyatuka). This is the manner in which everyone
is to know himself and in that, everyone’s Iness is common
with you. (Suhrawardi 112)
For Suhrawardi, we must necessarily arrive at the conclusion that all selves, including

the human self, resolve in the absolute, the first principle that constitutes the original

nature of every intelligent being. Suhrawardi calls this first principle the light of lights

(nur al anwawr, Suhrawardi 136) the. For Suhrawardi this first principle simply is

incorporeal light. And so he concludes his chapter on self-knowledge by affirming the

non-separation of the first principle and the human self. “It [one’s own awareness] is

simply the evident itself—nothing more. Therefore it is light in itself, and it is thus pure

light” (Suhrawardi 116). In other words, the human self and the first principle share the

same nature, the same reality, the same knowledge.

It is worth calling attention to the Platonic tradition of self-knowledge as divine

knowledge, as that tradition is represented in Arabic lore. This tradition is behind the

legendary report that Tardieu made much of, when he formulated his controversial thesis

that the late Neoplatonists transferred operations to Harran, after the closing of the

Academy in 529. Harran had been a town on the border of the Persian Empire, and was

known for its cosmopolitan paganism—a heady mixture of Greco-Arab-Syrian

traditions; it was possibly spared taxation by Chosroes in 540 because, as reported by

Procopius, “the majority [of the inhabitants] were not Christians.” 4 Tardieu’s thesis

relied heavily on a now controversial interpretation of a passage that details the visit of

the scholar al Mas’udi to Harran. In this narrative, al-Mas’udi describes a gathering

place of the Sabians where he sees a doorknocker inscribed with a Platonizing motto,
5
“He who knows himself becomes divine.” Arabists are increasingly skeptical that the

word Tardieu translates as “gathering place, majam’ ” can refer to what he infers is a

school or institution.6 Yet whatever we may think of the tradition reported by al-

Mas’udi, it is important to see that divine knowledge and self-knowledge were attributed

to the school of Plato by this 10th century litterateur.

For Suhrawardi, because that which knows just has the nature of light, and God too as

the light of lights has this nature, then to know oneself as this light is to know oneself as

God. Now I want to illustrate how this same structure of self-knowledge might function

in the dialogues of Plato, especially marked by the figure of Socrates who functions as

the awakener of divine self-knowledge in the 1st Alcibiades.

When Socrates’ Daimon finally allows him to speak to Alcibiades, the latter is no

longer a teenager, but has already grown a beard and is about to embark on his life’s

ambitions. Not content to be a leading man in Athens, Alcibiades thinks that ruling the

4
Athanassiadi, P. (1999). The Philosophical History. Athens, 52 quoting Procopius BP
II.13.7.
5
Watts, E. 2005, “Where to live the philosophical life in the sixth century? Damascius,
Simplicius, and the Return from Persia.” GRBS. 45. 3, 285.
6
See J. Lameer (1997), From Alexandria to Baghdad: reflections on the genesis of a
problematical tradition,” in G. Endress and Remke Kruk (1997: 181-191), (eds.) The
Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism, Leiden: CNWS. This article is
accepted by most Islamic scholars as a conclusive refutation of Tardieu.
world, being master of all men, sounds like a good job description. I Alcibiades, 105. But

Socrates is not so sure that Alcibiades has the qualifications: compare yourself to the

kings of Persia, Socrates urges. Don’t you know how they are raised from early

childhood? After spending seven years with select and highly prized eunuchs, their

education is overseen by four great sages, possessing the four cardinal virtues of

moderation, wisdom, courage, and justice. The wisest among them teaches the young

prince the wizardry that belongs to Zoroaster, son of Ohoromazda, and teaches as well

the royal art, the art of ruling oneself. (I Alcibiades, 122a2)

But this same art, the art of ruling oneself, is just what Socrates is going to teach the

young Alcibiades, in order to prepare him for his career goals, to be master of the

universe. How does one rule oneself? First, Alcibiades needs to know himself. He should

take care lest he end up knowing what is his, but not himself. Socrates and Alcibiades

agree that it seems clear—Alcibiades is his soul, not his body—but how can he find out

what this soul, his true self, really is. Socrates proposes an illustration: what if an eye

wanted to know itself? How would it find its nature? It could look into another eye, into

the pupil of the other person’s eye, to see what its own nature is. Socrates says that in

order to see itself, the eye must look into the place where vision occurs. Where does

vision occur? In order to see the purport of this question for the subject under discussion,

which is looking at the self itself, Socrates says that Alcibiades should look at the place in

the soul where knowledge arises. Socrates does not tell Alcibiades where wisdom arises,

but he says that nothing could be more like god, and that it is by looking into god that one

might see oneself most clearly. (133c8-13) Here, knowledge of oneself is knowledge of
god: to arrive at self-knowledge, Socrates is not concerned with knowledge of a particular

self—as he says, self-knowledge is knowledge of the absolute.

We now investigate the structure of this self-knowledge in the Platonic tradition. We

saw that for Suhrawardi, two things characterize self-knowledge: the first is that it is self-

evident in a way that cannot be true of other kinds of knowledge. The second is that,

unlike other kinds of knowledge, there is no intentional content at all in self-knowledge;

it is entirely non-representational. Thus Suhrawardi refers to knowledge by presence; it is

simply by being the self-evident that one knows one’s nature—the self does not become

an object of knowledge. Hence, knowledge and the knower are one and the same. Self-

knowledge is knowledge of the knower, but it is not knowledge of any states of the

knower. The experience, the state that we might say conditions knowledge, is always

something known, whereas the knower is that which knows, and not anything known.

It is just this paradigmatic knowledge that Plato attempts to represent in the guise of

Socratic wisdom, in the Socratic interpretation of Delphi’s gnothi sauton.

At Charmides 167c5, Socrates is discussing the meaning of the Delphic injunction in

company with Critias, future leader of the military coup d’etat of 303: to know oneself is

to know knowledge. Socrates asks if there is a vision that is not a vision of anything, but

that sees itself and all other visions; a hearing that hears itself and all other sounds, but is

not the hearing of anything, a love that loves itself and all other loves, but is not the love

of any good, a knowledge that knows itself and all other knowledges, but is not the

knowledge of anything.

But this is just what self-knowledge is: the essence of the self is to be a knower. For

the self to see itself, it must look to its knowledge, but not its knowledge of this or that,
rather, it must see that it is the seer. How can it see that? What is it that does the

knowing? Who is it that knows? If it sees itself as something, then of course, this can’t

be the seer, it can only be what is seen. So in looking for itself, it will find nothing at all.

In knowing itself, it will actually know nothing. And this is exactly what Socrates knows,

as he says in the Apology, under the auspices of Delphi: whatever can the god mean? For,

as Socrates says, he is conscious of his ignorance; he knows that he has no wisdom.

(Apology 21b; 21 d). When Socrates says that he is aware of not knowing anything,

whereas this kind of knowledge is the highest kind of knowledge, Plato perhaps intends

to signal that this kind of objectless knowing of oneself, knowing oneself by being the

knower, is the foundation of philosophy. This is something that might remind us of

Suhrawardi’s idea of knowledge by presence. There is awareness, but not an awareness

of anything. There is an awareness of oneself, but this knowledge amounts to knowing

nothing, since in knowing something, one knows, not the self, the knower, but rather, that

which is known.

I am not suggesting that Suhrawardi read the Platonic dialogues or recognized in

Socrates the paradigmatic sage, though of course I believe that it is entirely possible that

some versions or renditions of Socratic philosophy were available to Suhrawawrdi.7

Certainly, al-Kindi, perhaps the first Arab philosopher, is known to have written some

now lost treatises on Socrates, one of which bore the intriguing title, About what took

place between Socrates and the Sabians. Rather is most likely that Suhrawardi read

some Proclean material from the Elements of Theology (transmitted as the Book of the

Pure Good, in Latin, Liber de causis), as well as some material from Plotinus, including

7
Cf. Alon, I. 1995. Socrates Arabus. Jerusalem.
Ennead IV. 8 (transmitted in Arabic as the Theology of Aristotle). As for the latter,

Suhrawardi, although he understood the material to be by Aristotle, willfully ascribes it to

Plato and refers to it a number of times in his works.8 He also was familiar with Ibn Sina,

as many of his critiques of essential definition are directed against him. And it was Ibn

Sina who first developed a theory of knowledge by presence, according to which the self

always apprehends its own reality, though a knowledge that Ibn Sina calls consciousness

through consciousness (al shu’ur bi’l shu’ur), which is rather like an innate awareness of

self that must be prior to any act of self recognition.9 Suhrawardi seems to have

developed this doctrine in ways that equate such innate self-knowledge with dawq,

Platonist intuition.

Although there are affinities with Ibn Sina, we also find in the Introduction to the

Hikmat al sharq a criticism of Peripatetic philosophy as limited to the realm of the

discursive and in part one we find a critique of Aristotelian definition per genus et

differentiam. Among others that sound vaguely Plotinian is Suhrawardi’s critique of

being as a pseudo-genus. Recall that for Plotinus, substance cannot be a common genus

that extends over both intelligible and sensible being, for if so, ousia would be a common

predicate of the two species of being, intelligible and sensible, and thus could not be

either incorporeal or corporeal in itself. But it must be one or the other. Ergo substance is

not a genus of both ‘species’ of being. Perhaps there is some such inspiration behind

Suhrawardi’s famous rejection of Being or Existence, wujud, as the primary nature of the

real.

8
Walbridge, J. 2000. Leaven of the Ancients. Albany. 134-7.
9
Ibn Sina , al-Ta‘liqat, Badawı 1973. Cairo. 160–161. Cited by Amin Razavi 2003.
 Again, one Neoplatonist criticism of Aristotle’s theory is that for Aristotle, only some

predicates are used in the category of substance; all other predicates are accidents. But

what is the difference between these two kinds of predicate? Perhaps we can detect

similar strategies in the following passage from Suhrawardi’s treatise:

They argue, ‘the form is a constituent of the substance, so it

is a substance. But the substantiality of the forms consists
in their not being in a subject. Their being not in a subject
means that the locus is not independent of them. That the
locus is not independent of them means that they are
constituents of the locus. Thus to say, the form is a
constituent of the substance, so it is a substance is
equivalent to saying, the form is a constituent of the
substance, so it is a constituent of the substance. We have
shown that accidents may be constituents of substance. It
follows that an accident may be a condition of the existence
of a substance and a constituent of its existence in this
sense. (Suhrawardi 87)
It is at least possible that Suhrawardi was familiar with Platonist critiques of the

Aristotelian categories from Ennead VI, and that we can see echoes of these various

strategies in his criticisms of Peripatetic philosophy in part one of the Hikmat al Ishraq

and elsewhere. Suhrawardi couples this critique with a new articulation of what he

understood as Platonic intuition, the principle of knowledge by presence and self-

disclosure, based on the primacy of self-awareness. For Suhrawardi, the light that is self-

aware, the independent light, is the nature of all intelligent beings, and these beings only

differ from each other in their degree of intensity. Thus there is one universal entity that

contains all others as its gradations; the world is connected within through this self-

disclosure that belongs to the nature of intelligent beings. All of this might remind us of

Plotinus, with his insistence that each intellect is all of the intellects, that each soul is all

of the reason principles.

 Thus we can say that Suhrawardi’s Platonism, insofar as he is justified in calling his

philosophy Platonism is based on his acquaintance with Plotinus and with Proclus and is

further directly inspired by Ibn Sina, whom he does not cite, but that in invoking the idea

of dhawq, he introduces an interpretation of what Plato might have meant by intuitive

knowledge. My effort has been to show that we perhaps have something to learn from

Suhrawardi’s insistence on the primacy of self-knowledge in our own reading of Plato,

and that, with this clue, we can better understand the meaning of Socrates’ association

with Delphi, and of such foundational texts as Apology 21 b, I am aware that I have no

wisdom.