The Philosophy of Illumination by Suhrawardi: An Honest Review

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What This Book Is

Hikmat al-Ishraq, usually translated as The Philosophy of Illumination or The Wisdom of Illumination, was completed around 1186. Its author was in his early thirties and would be dead within five years.

The book has two halves that do quite different work.

The first is a critique of Peripatetic logic and metaphysics: the Aristotelian system as it had reached the Islamic world through Avicenna. It is dense, technical, and it goes after the foundations rather than the conclusions.

The second constructs a replacement, in which the fundamental term is light rather than being, reality is a graded hierarchy of luminosity, and the relations between things are relations of illumination and domination.

The standard English edition is the parallel-text translation by John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai, published by Brigham Young University Press, which is the version discussed here.

Who Suhrawardi Was

He was born around 1154 in northwestern Iran, in a village near Zanjan.

He studied in Maragha and Isfahan, receiving a thorough training in the philosophy of his day, which meant Avicenna above all. He was recognised early as unusually able and unusually difficult.

He travelled through Anatolia and Syria, producing a substantial body of work with extraordinary speed. Besides the major philosophical treatises there are shorter symbolic narratives in Persian, allegorical tales in which the soul's situation is presented in imagery rather than argument.

He arrived in Aleppo in the late 1180s and attached himself to the court of al-Malik al-Zahir, Saladin's son, who was young and became a keen supporter.

He was killed there in 1191, aged around thirty-six or thirty-eight depending on the dating.

The Execution

The sources disagree on the details and agree on the outline.

The religious scholars of Aleppo objected to him. Complaints reached Saladin, who wrote to his son instructing that the philosopher be dealt with. The prince resisted and then complied. Suhrawardi died in prison, by starvation or strangling according to which account you follow.

Several factors were probably in play. His influence over the young prince was resented. He held that the true philosopher, combining discursive and visionary knowledge, has an authority independent of the religious establishment, which is not a claim that establishment would welcome.

And his system openly invoked pre-Islamic Persian material, including angelic beings with names drawn from the Zoroastrian tradition, which gave his opponents a straightforward charge of reviving the religion of the fire-worshippers.

The philosophical content and the political situation cannot be cleanly separated, and readers should resist the romantic version in which a pure thinker was destroyed by ignorance. He was doing something that had consequences and he appears to have known it.

The Attack on the Peripatetics

The first half of the book is a demolition, and it is directed at the tradition he was trained in.

Avicenna's system, which had become the framework for philosophical work in the Islamic world, treats existence as the fundamental notion, distinguishes essence from existence, and builds a metaphysics on that distinction.

Avicenna's achievement was to make Aristotle systematic in a way that Aristotle himself had not, and by Suhrawardi's time the system was the default.

Suhrawardi's charge is that its central terms are empty. Existence, he argues, is not a real property that things have. It is a concept the mind forms, a notion of second intention, and treating it as a constituent of reality generates problems that have no solutions because they were never real problems.

This anticipates a great deal of later argument, and the position remained live in Persian philosophy for centuries, with Mulla Sadra eventually taking the opposite side and arguing for the primacy of existence.

The Argument About Definition

The sharpest single piece of reasoning in the book and the one most worth extracting.

The Aristotelian account of definition says you define a thing by giving its genus and its differentia: the general class it belongs to and what distinguishes it within that class. Man is a rational animal.

Suhrawardi objects that this cannot work as a route to knowledge of essences.

To define something by its differentia, you must already know the differentia. But the differentia is precisely what is peculiar to the thing, which means it is exactly what you were trying to find out. If you already know it, the definition tells you nothing. If you do not, you cannot construct the definition.

The conclusion he draws is that essential definition is impossible, that the whole Aristotelian programme of arriving at essences through definition fails, and that if knowledge of things is possible it must come by some other route.

Light as First Principle

The replacement, and the move that gives the system its name.

Suhrawardi begins from light, and he begins from it because it is the one thing that requires no definition. Light is evident in itself and makes other things evident. Any attempt to define it would use terms less clear than the thing being defined.

This solves the problem he has just created. If definition is impossible but some things are self-evident, then a system built on the self-evident can proceed without definitions.

The critical point, and the one most readers get wrong: light here is not a metaphor for being or for intellect. It is the primitive term. Physical light, the light of the sun, is a low and accidental instance of a reality that is fundamentally luminous.

The inversion matters. In most systems that use light imagery, physical light is the literal case and everything else is analogy. Here the relation runs the other way.

Degrees and the Order of Lights

The structure that follows, which is where the debt to Neoplatonism shows most clearly.

Lights differ in intensity, and only in intensity. There is no difference in kind between a stronger and a weaker light, which means reality is a single continuum rather than a set of distinct substances.

At the top is the Light of Lights, the source, which is one and from which everything proceeds. Below it a hierarchy of immaterial lights, each arising from the one above through a relation of illumination.

Suhrawardi complicates the standard Neoplatonic scheme considerably. Where the classical account gives a single chain, he generates a large and horizontally structured order, with lights arising not only downward but through the interaction of lights with one another and with their own reflections.

Below the immaterial lights come the managing lights, which govern bodies, including the human soul. Below those, barriers: the dark bodies, which are defined negatively as that which is not light.

Matter, in this system, is not a substance. It is the absence of luminosity, and darkness has no positive nature of its own.

Knowledge by Presence

The most philosophically alive part of the book and the reason it is still discussed.

The received account of knowledge, then and largely now, is representational. To know a thing is to have a form of it in the mind. The knowledge is one item and the thing known is another, and the question of how the two correspond is the standing problem.

Suhrawardi's alternative is knowledge by presence, al-ilm al-huduri. In the paradigm case there is no representation at all, because the knower and the known are the same thing.

The paradigm case is self-awareness. When you are aware of yourself, you do not have a picture of yourself which you inspect. You are present to yourself, and the presence is the knowing.

From this he argues that representational knowledge is the derivative case: a weaker mode that arises where presence is not available, and that inherits all the problems of correspondence precisely because it lacks the immediacy of the primary case.

The Self-Awareness Argument

The demonstration deserves setting out, because it is tighter than the summary suggests.

Suppose self-knowledge were representational. Then to know myself I would need a form of myself present to me. But to recognise that form as being of me, I would need already to know myself in order to make the comparison.

That prior knowledge would in turn need its own form, and so on without end. The regress means representational self-knowledge is impossible.

Yet self-awareness plainly occurs. Therefore some knowledge is non-representational, and the case where it occurs is the case where knower and known coincide.

The argument has been noticed by modern philosophers of mind working on the problem of self-reference, and its structure survives translation out of the light metaphysics entirely. It is the piece of Suhrawardi that a contemporary reader can engage without accepting anything else in the system.

The World of Images

The innovation with the widest downstream effect.

Suhrawardi posits an ontological level between the intelligible and the physical: the alam al-mithal, the world of image or of suspended forms, where things have shape, extension and colour but no matter.

The motivation is a problem the inherited philosophy could not handle. Visionary experience, dream, the appearances reported by contemplatives: these have specific sensory content, which the world of pure intellect cannot supply, and they have no physical location, which the material world requires.

The intermediate level gives them an address. They are not physical and they are not merely subjective. They occur somewhere, and the somewhere has a structure.

This is not a small move. It converts visionary experience from a psychological event into a perception of a real region, which changes what can be said about its truth or falsity: a vision can be accurate or inaccurate about something.

The concept became central to later Islamic philosophy, ran through Ibn Arabi and his school, and entered twentieth-century Western discussion as the imaginal, a term coined precisely to stop the material being filed under imaginary.

Why He Requires Practice

A structural feature of his position rather than a piece of piety.

Suhrawardi divides philosophers by two capacities: discursive skill and visionary experience. A person may have either, both, or neither, and he ranks them accordingly, with the possessor of both at the top.

The reason is internal to the epistemology. If the highest knowledge is by presence, and presence requires a state in which the soul is capable of it, then preparation of the soul is a philosophical requirement and not a devotional extra.

He prescribes ascetic practice, retreat, and reduction of attachment to the body, on the grounds that the managing light is obscured by its involvement with the barrier it governs.

He is equally firm in the other direction. Visionary experience without logical training produces claims that cannot be assessed, and the section of the book on logic exists because he does not think experience alone is sufficient.

The Claim About Ancient Wisdom

A feature that shaped his reception and that should be handled carefully.

Suhrawardi presents his philosophy as a recovery rather than an invention. He claims a single wisdom transmitted from ancient sources, naming both a Greek line running through Plato and a Persian line running through the sages of ancient Iran, and holds that Illuminationism reunites the two streams.

Historically this is not defensible in the form he gives it. His account of the Persian transmission is constructed rather than documented, and the ancient sages he names are largely legendary figures.

What the claim is doing is easier to see than whether it is true. It gives his system a genealogy older than the Peripatetic tradition he is displacing, and it makes his innovation look like restoration.

It is also what got him killed, or contributed to it, since a Persian philosopher in Ayyubid Syria claiming descent from Zoroastrian sages was handing his enemies a weapon.

The Problems With It

Three, stated plainly.

Light does not obviously do the work. Having refused to define his primitive term, Suhrawardi then makes a great many specific claims about how lights relate, which look like claims about being in different vocabulary. The suspicion that the system is Peripatetic metaphysics relabelled is not easy to dismiss entirely.

The gradation of a single continuum has costs. If everything differs only in intensity, it becomes hard to account for genuine differences in kind, and the treatment of matter as pure privation strains against the specificity of the physical world.

The imaginal world is posited rather than argued. It solves a problem elegantly and the solution is stipulative. Nothing shows that the reports requiring an intermediate level could not be accounted for some other way.

Where the Influence Went

The reception is geographically lopsided and this explains his obscurity in Europe.

In the Persian and later Shia philosophical tradition, Illuminationism became one of the permanent schools, taught alongside Peripatetic philosophy and the Sufi tradition, and generating commentary for centuries.

Mulla Sadra in the seventeenth century built a synthesis that absorbed Suhrawardi's insights while reversing his position on the primacy of essence, and Sadra's system dominated Iranian philosophy thereafter.

In the Latin West, almost nothing. Avicenna and Averroes were translated and shaped scholastic thought; Suhrawardi was not. The standard European narrative of philosophy after Aristotle passes through the Islamic world and misses him entirely.

He reached Western readers substantially through twentieth-century scholarship, and that route brought its own interpretive frame with it.

How to Read It

Practical advice, because the book defeats readers who approach it in the wrong order.

Read the translator's introduction fully before the text. It is long and it supplies the Peripatetic background the first half assumes.

Consider reading the second half before the first. The metaphysics is more approachable and it explains what the logical critique was for.

Have some Avicenna in view. The arguments are aimed at specific positions, and the force of them is invisible without knowing what is being attacked. Al-Ghazali's critique is a useful comparison, since he attacked the same tradition from a different direction.

Read the symbolic treatises alongside it if you can find them. They present the same material as narrative, and the two modes illuminate each other in a way he clearly intended.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you have a footing in Islamic philosophy or in Neoplatonism and want to see the most original thing produced in the tradition.

Read it if the problem of how mystical experience relates to rational argument interests you, because this is a system where the relation is worked out rather than asserted.

Read the self-awareness argument even if you read nothing else. It is a self-contained piece of philosophy and it holds up.

Do not start here with Islamic thought. Schimmel for the mystical tradition, Avicenna for the philosophical background, and then this.

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