HUMAN KNOWLEDGE OF GOD ACCORDING TO SUHRAWARDĪ’S METAPHYSICS OF LIGHTS

This paper will argue that, in the book entitled Ḥikmat al-Išrāq, Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191), the Šayḫ al-Išrāq, presents his project of what a metaphysical system should be: a “Metaphysics of experience”, or, in Suhrawardian terms, a “Science of lights” (ʿilm al-anwār). In his Metaphysics, Suhrawardī is known both for his criticism of Avicennian Peripateticism and his appropriation thereof. This paper will attempt to show that the conceptual foundation of Suhrawardī’s Metaphysics of lights is the identity between “apprehension” and “reality”, epistemologically expressed in terms of “manifestness” (ẓuhūr), ontologically in terms of “light” (nūr), and cosmologically in terms of “illumination” (išrāq). The immediate character of apprehension allows to establish the priority of experience over any kind of demonstration and representation. In a deepest level of experience, the apprehender – that is, a “pure light” – grasps the apprehensible as an irradiation of lights, and both are sharing the same flow of illumination. As a corollary, our apprehension of God, the Light of lights, and our apprehension of the divine realm, the world of lights, is the same sort of apprehension that we ordinarily have, but within which the apprehensible things and the apprehender are revealed in an entirely different depth. This paper will be concluded with a general characterization of how, in this point, some Mystics, in their personal experience, have apprehended the reality more deeply than the Peripatetics in their philosophy. Nevertheless, it is not a refusal of philosophy, in general, or Peripatetic philosophy, in particular, but is rather a search for subsuming “philosophy” within the mystical tradition’s framework. Therefore, mysticism is not conceived as a way to irrationality, but rather as assisting philosophers to transform philosophical tradition as such, and to become able to apprehend the reality in its profoundness.