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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

DIALECTIC AND TEMPORALITY IN SUHRAWARDĪ'S USES OF PLENITUDE

Résumé

In his monumental new book, The Formation, of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam (OUP, 20022), Frank Griffel advances in a text of over 600 pages the fascinating thesis that Post-Classical Islamic thought from the 12th century onwards gave birth to a new original philosophy, that in his depth, width and influence must be put on the same level as Rationalism, German Idealism and British Empiricism. Griffel calls this new current ḥikma – wisdom – which contrary to a widespread opinion, does not reduce to rational theology (kalām) but to an autonomous strong current of thought which produced new concepts and perspectives. In his book Griffel gives Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī’s (549/1155 - 587/1191) work a crucial place in the rising of this new thought in the History of philosophy, namely, a place at the junction between the Avicennean tradition and its opponents. More precisely, Griffel (2022, p. 263) points out that the origin of Suhrawardī’s innovations is the outcome of the proposal to set a new way for philosophy that results from the intertwining of the Avicennean discursive tradition of al-baḥth or enquiry with the Sufi tradition al-dhawq or tasting– explicitly mentioned in the introduction of al-Ishrāq (1999, section 5, p. 3). However, and this already constitutes one of the main points of our paper, Griffel’s insights on the rise of ḥikmat in general and of Suhrawardī’s Illuminationist Philosophy in particular, should be completed by a thorough study on the development of another current of thought taking place by that time, namely the fusion of logic and dialectic theory promoted by the twelfth-century-CE eastern school of Raḍī al-Dīn al-Nīsābūrī (d. 544/1149) students, especially Rukn al-Dīn al-ʿAmīdī (d. 615/1218), and others – see Young (2021a,b,c). Indeed, remarkable is the fact that Suhrawardī’s proof-methods for modalities and the notion of existence as presence delineated in al-Ishrāq, are developed in his discourse on fallacies (mughālaṭa) – cf. al-Ishrāq (1999, section 48, p. 38). These proof-methods are semantical or more accurately dialectical rather than syntactical. Indeed, they follow the so-called dialectical no-counterexample interpretation of the quantifiers, by the means of which the search for a counterexample is governed by rules of interaction. More generally, it very much looks as the theory of meaning at work is what we call dialogical meaning explanations, whereby the meaning of an expression is determined by rules that prescribe how to deploy them in an interactive situation of justification. The dialectical stance shapes his notion of contingency, unfolded within a temporal structure that articulates both dimensions of time, namely, the epistemological and logical dimensions. The epistemological dimension, assumes that we experience time through the experience of change, and the logical dimension assumes an abstract time required by our experience of change in the sense that temporal order (defined on this abstract time) is a logical presupposition for experiencing incompatible facts as involving the same substance. Whereas, Avicenna, in his revolutionary move that integrates explicitly temporality within logic, focused on the abstract time, Suhrawardī’s epistemology of presence articulates both of the dimensions mentioned above, whereby producing a presence (in fact, an abstract witness of such a presence) is part and parcel of the dialectical meaning explanations of the temporal structure shaping his modalities. Moreover, Suhrawardī’s understanding of contingency involves both generic and individual forms of temporal Plenitude. Whereas individual Plenitude attributes a contingent capacity that must be realized de re (every contingent capacity attributed to an individual instance of the subject must be realized at least once and at least once not), generic Plenitude attributes contingency to the subject-term (if the subject-term stands for a species, every contingent capacity attributed to the subject as a whole must be realized at least once for at least one instance of the species, and there must be another instance of that species for which this capacity will not be realized). The epistemology of presence, also seems to include – or at least admits, Avicenna’s merely conceivable realisation of the contingent, which displays a form of weak Plenitude. Weak Plenitude might be related to the Neoplatonist conception of the realization in the realm of the intelligible – cf. Kukkonen (2002). Important for understanding Suhrawardī’s logical framework is that the “necessity” involved in the notion of Plenitude – i.e. that the attributed capacity must be realized – by his own words, only applies to those attributes (capacities or properties) that are said of instances of the essence of the subject term, meaning, the subject is taken as that what it is without any conditions or is qualified by a necessary contingent attribute. In contrast, those attributes that follow from describing how the subject is, by specifying some merely contingent actualized attribute (dependent upon some condition) on the subject term, such as attributing the capacity of moving fast to a human who is (actually) writing are purely accidental, since the subject is described as enjoying a temporary attribute, and thus do not satisfy Plenitude (it must not be actualized) if the subject is taken as deprived of that temporary attribute – al-Ishrāq (1999, p. 16, p. 17). We will come back to this later on, but notice that this is the reason behind Suhrawardī’s dismissal of Avicenna’s descriptional (waṣfī) propositions. In our logical analysis we will follow three further main philosophical principles of Suhrawardī: 1.Time is a magnitude. This principle, inherited from Avicenna (and Aristotle), amounts to reject logical analyses that render moments as bearers of events – such as in Hodges’s (2016) and Hodges&Johnston’s (2017) formalizations of Avicenna’s logic: events are not properties of moments ! This take might also be linked to Tianyi Zhang’s (2023) observa-tion that, according to Suhrawardī, time is not in fact existent but a construct constituted by acts of remembering and anticipation out of the experience of the present indexed by a reference point produced by imagination in relation to which the before and the after are defined, the “instantaneous moment in imagination” (Ilal âne al wahmî a daf ‘î ,!لى الآن الوهمى الدفعى ) or now – al-Ishrāq (1999, section 185, p. 120). Remembering amounts to re-actualizing an event actualized in the intelligible realm, similar for anticipations of premo-nitions – the intelligible realm is the one of the divine mind or of celestial entities which constitutes the world of memory – al-Ishrāq (1999, section 220, p. 136), and where the in-scription of all beings have been recorded as forms – al-Ishrāq (1999, sections 252 and 253, p. 152). 2.Temporal modalities are ways the Predicate Term relates to the Subject Term – cf. al-Ishrāq (1999, section 19, pp. 16-17). This indicates that temporal operators are to be understood as linked to the theory of predicables, rather than as monadic Priorian-style connectives – cf Malink (2006,2013), who points this out in his reconstruction of Aristotle’s modalities as predicables. More precisely, Suhrawardī’s necessarily necessary predication admitting simple conversion corresponds to Aristotle’s predicable by definition, necessarily necessary predication not admitting simple conversion corresponds to predicable by genus; Suhrawardī’s necessarily contingent predication admitting simple conversion corresponds to Aristotle’s predicable by proprium, necessarily contingent predication not admitting simple conversion corresponds to predicable by accident. 3.Suhrawardī’s weak form of Plenitude, that admits realization in the purely intelligible, can be reconstructed by means of a branching time structure, rather than by assuming a possible world semantics. A reconstruction of such a system, when coupled with some properties satisfied by Suhrawardī’s form of Plenitude such as the principle of sufficient reason, has bearings to crucial interwoven discussions within ḥikma’s framework, involving the problem of free-will – notice that whereas individual Plenitude assumes some form of determinism, generic does not, at least not necessarily so. In one word, according to our view it is the notion of Plenitude that links his logic and epistemology with his metaphysical enquiries. Moreover, this suggest that a focus on the notion of Plenitude might offer new perspectives on the development of ḥikma. However, the present paper is just a first exploration towards developing such a link.
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halshs-04195039 , version 1 (04-09-2023)
halshs-04195039 , version 2 (07-09-2023)
halshs-04195039 , version 3 (09-09-2023)
halshs-04195039 , version 4 (28-09-2023)

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Shahid Rahman, Rayane Boussad. DIALECTIC AND TEMPORALITY IN SUHRAWARDĪ'S USES OF PLENITUDE. Reason and Nature. Science, Philosophy and Theology in Classical and Post-Classical Islam., Société Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences et de la Philosophie Arabes et Islamiques, Sep 2023, Munich, Germany. ⟨halshs-04195039v1⟩
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