Corbin: The Question of Comparative Philosophy:

THE QUESTION OF COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Convergences in Iranian and European Thought

HENRY CORBIN

1. Comparative Philosophy and Phenomenology

This evening we are here to consider the nature of one of the essential tasks that the Imperial Iranian Academy will have to face: to find out what comparative philosophy is, and how its undertakings are to be conceived.

The term “comparative philosophy” is frequently used. Nevertheless, when the scope of the various comparative disciplines—comparative grammar, comparative literature, comparative aesthetics, and so on—is taken into consideration it must be admitted that comparative philosophy is still just beginning. This retardation is not inexplicable; it is difficult to specify a method guaranteed against arbitrariness, since not everything is comparable with everything else. Thus circumscribing the field of comparative research in satisfactory terms is a difficult art. Furthermore, at the origin of these difficulties, there are too few philosophers with broad enough compass and necessary linguistic tools to allow them a firsthand approach to the texts.

The concept of comparative philosophy was clearly expressed for the first time, as far as I know, at the beginning of the 1920s in a doctoral thesis presented at the Sorbonne under that title by Paul Masson-Oursel, who later held the chair of Indian religion in the Religious Sciences section of our Ecole des Hautes-Études. Masson-Oursel set himself to define the object of comparative philosophy as strictly as possible. As he saw it, this was essentially the separating out, not of similarities between more or less deceptive terms, but of analogous relationships (of the type a : b :: c : d). Possibly, his idea remained too dependent on a single-minded view of the history of philosophy as history, subject to chronological succession and the hypothetical laws of historic causality. Certainly this kind of research should not be excluded; it will come in its time. But it is not in its essence the primary object of a comparative philosophy, one of the first problems of which will be to inquire precisely how the shape of lived time is involved—here and elsewhere—and consequently the concept of something like history, a history of philosophy.

Therefore, what a comparative philosophy should achieve in the different sectors of a definite field of comparison is, above all, what the Germans call Wesensschau, the intuitive perception of an essence. The term belongs to the vocabulary of phenomenology, say to the strict observation phenomenology of Husserl rather than the existential (we must take care not to say existentialist) phenomenology of Heidegger. It seems to me that phenomenology has made any attempt like Masson-Oursel’s outdated. The tasks postulated by the intuitive perception of essence are entirely different from those that history encounters. We must therefore very briefly recall the meaning of the word phenomenology.

I have defined it elsewhere,^* and in any case its meaning is independent of any special school of phenomenology. Let us try to translate this word into Persian not by looking in a dictionary, but rather by looking at the procedure that phenomenological enquiry follows. Essentially it is connected with a motto of Greek science: sôzein ta phainomena—preserve the phenomena (the appearances). And what does that mean? The phenomenon is what can be seen, what is apparent. In appearing it reveals something that can be seen in it only while something reveals itself only by hiding. In philosophical and religious disciplines, the phenomenon is found in technical terms containing the Greek root phany: epiphany, theophany, hierophany, and so on. In Persia the phenomenon, phainomenon, is the ẓāhir, the apparent, the exterior, the exoteric. The thing that reveals itself while hiding itself in the ẓāhir, is the bāṭin, the interior, the esoteric. Phenomenology consists in “preserving the phenomenon,” preserving the appearance, while disengaging or unveiling the hidden thing that reveals itself beneath that appearance. The logos of the phenomenon, the phenomenology, is therefore the hidden, the invisible thing beneath the visible. It allows the phenomenon to reveal itself as it does to the subject to whom it is revealing itself. Thus the phenomenological approach is entirely different from that of the history of philosophy, or historical criticism.

But then is not phenomenological research what the old treatises called kasfh al-maḥjūb, the unveiling of the hidden? Is it not also what is meant by ta’wīl, a term fundamental to the spiritual hermeneutics of the Koran? Ta’wīl is tracing a thing back to its source, to its archetype (chīzī ba’aṣl-e khōd rasānidan). Taking it back, we make it pass from level to level of being and in doing so bring out the structure of its essence (which does not at all mean that we are structuralists). The structure is tartib al-mazahir, the system governing the forms of manifestation of the given essence.

Roughly, this is what “phenomenology” means, and it is a phenomenological approach that we must utilize in order successfully to achieve the task of comparative philosophy. It is a task entirely distinct from that of the history of philosophy and one that could even be said to preserve us from the perils of history. In our time the sense of such perils has become very acute among certain Western philosophers. To understand this and thus help ourselves to conceive the task of comparative philosophy, we must go back to the eminent philosopher who first used the word phenomenology. I am thinking of Hegel and his Phenomenology of Spirit. The fate of the occidental philosopher of our time is to be unable to avoid referring to Hegel one way or another. We shall do so too, not to take on the weight of the Hegelian adventure but to deliver ourselves from it. Only then will we know clearly why we have to deal with the different forms of post-Hegelian historical dialectic and what we can oppose to historicism, a form without hope, so as to “save the phenomenon” in an entirely different way than by taking recourse to any kind of dialectic.

2. How Can We Get Out of Historicism?

The “phenomenology of the Spirit,” as Hegel conceived it, is without doubt a unique monument in Western philosophy. Here I want only to formulate a matter of observation in no way personal to me which can be resumed as follows: It is not positivistic science, as has perhaps been thought, that has caused the explosion of the Hegelian system, the culminating point of which is the phenomenology of the Spirit. The explosion has been caused by History. And what does that mean?

Political jargon, transposed to philosophy, spoke very early, from the first generation, of a Hegelian right and a Hegelian left. The Hegelian right was represented by theologians who were called “speculative” in the technical sense of the word (derived from the Latin speculum, mirror), and they read Hegel in the same way that they read great mystical philosophers like Jacob Boehme or Meister Eckhart whom Hegel himself greatly admired. Unfortunately, this way of reading Hegel did not prevail and the Hegelianism represented by it has been, as it were, conjured away to the benefit of an entirely different unilateral interpretation, the virulence of which made itself felt throughout the nineteenth century and right down to this day. Thus there was an initial ambiguity weighing on the system. We will have to go further into its origins by the light of a comparative philosophy with new perspectives which have come out of theosophical speculations unknown in Hegel’s time. For it was precisely this original ambiguity that enabled History to explode the Hegelian system.

What is the situation actually, at the end of the Hegelian “phenomenology”? Absolute Spirit has gained consciousness of itself. The times are perfected. History is fulfilled. Its eschaton, its final expression, has arrived. That which the language of theology calls eschatology, to designate the events at the end, has been achieved forever. To be sure, if a mystical theosopher reading about these things understands them to be events taking place in the Malakūt—the world of subtle Earth, the Soul-World, not on the empirical earth and in history—there will be no surprise or hindrance. But unfortunately in the Hegelian context we have to do with events taking place in this world and with our eschatology fulfilling itself in these events (the figure of Napoleon, the Prussian monarchy). But History should have stopped then, nothing should have happened any more.

Unfortunately, History continued, but to do so it had to pass beyond the eschatology that until then oriented by giving it meaning. Deprived of that eschatology, since it was behind in the past now rather than before it, History cannot help being disoriented and desperately seeking a direction [sens] that it can no longer find. In losing its meaning [sens] by continuing beyond eschatology, History has gone mad. (Thus I am echoing Chesterton’s declaration that the world today is full of Christian ideas gone mad.) We have here the live drama of a theological system—that is, an essential and continual waiting—being laicized, or secularized. To disrupt that waiting is to deliver eschatology to all the perils of history. After that nothing is left but a pseudo-eschatology burdening our minds with a pseudo-mythological “sense of history.” For how can a sense of history be discovered without some point of reference outside of history, without a transhistorical dimension?

It is important for us to keep our eyes on this drama because eschatology, eschatological waiting, is very deeply rooted in all our minds, Ahl al-Kitāb, and that is what enables us not to succumb to the perils of history. If we don’t become conscious of it, if we entertain this negation of ourselves with any complaisance, then we are in danger of being swallowed up. Certainly the mystery of this cosmic dramaturgy, deprived of meaning because the eschaton, the final perspective of it, can no longer be seen, invites us to go back to the theological sources of which all our ideological and socio-political systems in the West in the nineteenth century have been no more than laicized variants. Where does the notion come from in a man like Hegel of an absolute Spirit of which humanity is the locus and the organ?

The question now becomes: how is our comparative philosophy to liberate itself from the perils of history through a phenomenological method that no longer exposes it to the Hegelian catastrophe? We must, however, watch out for one thing: an essential connection between, on the one hand, the disappearance of eschatology entailing an endless, unlimited fall into History, and on the other hand archaeology, we could call it “protology,” meaning the search, even the passion for things that are antique, original, and primary (the archeon, the proton being the counter pole of the eschaton). What a lot of work, what a lot of trouble of all kinds, has been taken by the West all over the world for more than a century to accomplish what may be called this redemption of lost civilizations! It has been a work without precedent that the West may take pride in. Yet at the core of its success we find the same distress. Can the recovery of vanished ages of humanity compensate us for the loss of eschatology?

Archaeologists and prehistorians do their best to fit the vestiges that reappear into chronologies whose margins of doubt are often considerable. But when that is done just what have we achieved? Does the archeon of archaeology allow us to regain the eschaton of eschatology? Who would dare to suppose so? Certainly not a philosophy of history since this can be perfectly agnostic and content with setting up some sort of causal explanatory principle the virtue of which is infinitely vulnerable. Indeed this kind of an explanation rarely survives more than one generation. It is striking that the big collections of historical synthesis have to be rethought and remade just about every thirty years. […]

So when we phenomenologists and philosophers revolt against “historicism"” which no longer sees things originating in anything but chronology, what do we mean?

(1) Certainly nothing like renouncing the study of history. Should mankind give up knowing and studying its history it would become amnesic, like an individual who has lost his memory. There may even be danger that this is happening today. Otherwise why is it that the decisions and statements we make—either directly or indirectly—concerning the fate of mankind so often betray a fabulous ignorance of history? When young people, and others not so young, say they do not want to know about the past, they overlook the fact that scientists, geologists and mineralogists have to know very well at what depth the objects of their science lie buried. And finally where are the sources of the energy we hear so much about today if not in the earth’s distant past? Where is the future of a river? Is it at the mouth where the river loses itself in the sea, or is it not rather at its source? Our human disciplines should not forget this.

No, the philosophers’ protest against historicism is in no way related to that kind of simplistic view.

(2) What they do aim at is the conception developed with the disorientation of historic consciousness itself, which undertakes to limit the significance and range of a philosophical system to the epoch when it makes its appearance, as though the epoch were its sole explanation. Again, the same madness: still the attempt to make the social situation the primary datum, whereas it only follows from a perception of the world that entirely precedes the empirical state of things. This view has completely warped the perspective of the study of religions. They say of a philosopher that he is very much of his time, naively forgetting quite simply that the philosopher is himself of his time: for if he is a real philosopher he dominates the time that is wrongly called his, though actually it is not his at all but everyone’s anonymous time.

Here we come up against the great infirmity of what is called modern thought. It works unceasingly to close off all issues that might lead into anything beyond this world (that is called agnosticism). For this it has made use of historicism, sociology, psychoanalysis, even linguistics. Instead of saving the phenomena, it has thoroughly disintegrated and swallowed them, refusing them any transcendent significance and decreeing with a mistaken sense of security that it is no longer possible to go in for metaphysics. But why should we bow to that decree? Under the lazy pretext of espousing our epoch? In that case if we learn to look at things as did Suhrawardī, our shaikh al-Ishraq, we will hasten to pronounce a divorce.

For the shaikh al-Ishraq the observations of astronomers, for example, continue to be valuable, may even gain further precision, and everyone who is not an astronomer himself has confidence in them. There are also the observations of philosophers and spiritual persons who have penetrated into the Malakūt, into the subtle invisible world of the soul. Their observations deserve the same confidence as the astronomers’, and those who have not penetrated into the Malakūt need only to regulate themselves by them. Indeed, what is the use of criticisms addressed to those who have seen things themselves, and are therefore eyewitnesses, by those who have never seen anything and never will? This Suhrawardian view is, I know, an intrepid position to take. But I believe the situation is such that the philosopher with a sense of responsibility should adopt Suhrawardī’s boldness.

We may go along with Suhrawardī and call what I earlier designated Wesensschau, a vision of things in the Malakūt. But the date when a philosopher formulates his vision is a point of reference, nothing more. The truth of Suhrawardī’s “oriental Theosophy” (ḥikmat al-Ishraq) is not that it was formulated in 582/1187 AD. The vision of such things occurs not in this world but in the Malakūt, not in the time of this world but in the time of the Malakūt. Not to accept the vision as such, to challenge or change its content, is quite simply to annihilate the phenomenon. That may be what rationalistic historical criticism does. But it is certainly not the purpose of phenomenology.

(3) From this fundamental criticism, that we bring against the historicists’ reduction of metaphysical events, another criticism follows: This is a revolt against the assumption that the idea of a happening can be limited to happenings in this world, to happenings that are perceptible in the empirical way and verifiable by anyone at all. No, there are other happenings, happenings in their own right, not subject to the norms of empirical happenings. These are happenings in Heaven, in the Malakūt (like the prologue and the finale of Faust II). The infirmity of our time is that it no longer conceives of such events as real. That is why we have got into the false dilemma: myth or history? All that our time cannot think of as historical, in the empirical sense of the word, it makes into myth, that is, into unreality. As a result our time has fallen into the ridiculous trap very fashionable today—of so-called “demythologization” which no longer even tries to understand the order of events that are neither mythical nor historical.

In our time, the ruling concept represents man as being in history. It conceives of history as external, exoteric, and foundering under the burden of an historical causality which it has itself introduced. Over against this there is another fundamental conception without which the idea of external history, of “historical phenomena” is deprived of all foundation. According to this view history is in man. For only with man does anything like history begin. Therefore essentially man always brings with him something prior to history, something he will never cease to carry in himself that will save him from external history. Then it becomes a matter of internal history, which is esoteric in the etymological sense of the word, of subtle history. Its events do not occur in the external world of objects but in the subtle world of situations being lived through. They are happenings in the Malakūt, the “Heaven” or “Hell” that man carries inside himself.

This history that each carries within, this inner heaven and hell, shows itself objectively in the web of external events that results whenever human wills commingle. It is also to be seen in stories the events of which may be said to take place in the Malakūt, although they are situated in settings that appear to be of this world. The fact is, however, that such events can be perceived and recognized only by a different organ of perception than the one which knows about empirical, physical, or historical things. For these are the events that fill the chronicles about epic heroes (the Avesta or the Shāh-nāmeh, for example, or our Grail cycle). Furthermore it is events in this inner, secret history that inspire parables, those truest of all stories. Broadly speaking then, these events constitute sacred history, hiero-history, hierology, and—to avoid any confusion with empirical history—we will call them simply events in hierologies.

To perceive such events one must somehow belong oneself to this sacred history as it takes place in the Malakūt. Proof of this is that the reality sui generis of such events is what those who do not belong deny vehemently (when they are not totally indifferent). We all know the episode in the Koran of the question put to all mankind in the person of the Primordial man: A-lastu bi-rabbikum? Am I not your Lord? This is certainly not history in the current sense of the word since the episode took place before there was time in the world. I could multiply such examples taken from the Bible, the Kabbala, the Koran, and from ḥadīth. (Such events are of an entirely different order from the campaigns of Julius Caesar or Napoleon’s reign, which can be recorded in the history of textbooks.) To do justice to them means recognizing that they have a reality of their own in an intermediate world that our Iranian philosophers have made the special object of their investigations. This is the ‘ālam al-mithāl, the mundus imaginalis, an imaginal world which is not imaginary but barzakh, in-between, an intermediate world between the sensible and the intelligible.

So you see: whether we are concerned with laying a foundation for the phenomena of external history in the internal history of man, or a foundation for the phenomena of the intermediate world which are visionary manifestations of man’s inner world, in order to understand their meaning, to save their reality the same steps are necessary: Kashf al-Mḥjūb, the disengaging and unveiling of that which reveals itself by hiding itself in the phainomenon. As I said earlier that is what phenomenology is about and that is also the way the ta’wīl is practiced among mystical theosophers. It has nothing to do with constructing dialectic, but rather with inducing the hidden to let itself be seen. And that essentially is hermeneutics. It is worth remarking that in the three great families of Ahl al-Kitāb this advance in thought has had theological origins.

(4) So now we are in a better position to conceive the task of comparative philosophy: to understand that it can neither be ordered according to the chronological plans of the history of philosophy nor used to construct a philosophy of history. I will take an example close to us in Iran and refer to Suhrawardī again. Had our shaikh al-Ishraq believed, as he would be told today, that a philosophy is no more than a superstructure reflecting the social conditions of the moment and soon to be superseded by the next moment, he would not have brought the philosophy of Light professed by the sages of ancient Persia back to life in Islamic Iran. His resolute decision, however, sufficed to eliminate the chronological hiatus. According to him the Khosrovāniyun of ancient Iran are the precursors of the Ishrāqīyūn, the “Persian Platonists.” To the historian of material positivism this may seem to be taking a spiritual view. But to the phenomenologist it is a spiritual deed in its own right, effectively accomplished with all its consequences.

That being understood, I will suggest three examples, […] three themes for comparative research that are for me still in the planning stage. So you must not expect any firm conclusions but rather a trust in investigations to come.

3. Three Examples of Comparative Themes

In our case the task of comparison rests on a solid basis since the themes proposed for it have a common root in the mystical theosophy professed by sages in all three great communities of the Abrahamic tradition. The participation of Iran adds a special note which we owe to Suhrawardī due to the blending of the Zoroastrian prophetic tradition with the prophetic tradition of the Bible and Koran. Any comparative philosophy wishing to proceed phenomenologically must do so with great discernment since the aim of comparison is not uniquely to discover resemblances but also differences. Moreover it is necessary that the things being compared should be significantly related to something in common. For what must be absolutely firmly assured is a common point of departure. I believe this is the case with the three themes I will propose to you here. They are concerned with: (1) the Platonic ideas; (2) the doctrine of intensifications of being; and (3) the division of sacral or hierohistory into periods.

(1) The Platonic Ideas (mothol aflatūnīya) or the archetypes of light (mothol nūrīya) are the dominating theme in the philosophy of the “Persian Platonists,” the Ishrāqīyūn. […]^** Now one of the problems traditionally considered to be among the most difficult in Platonic philosophy is the reconciliation of the Idea’s immanence with its transcendence. The Idea has to be immanent or sensible objects would not be what they are. But simultaneously the Idea has to remain radically transcendent. It escapes change, birth, death, and corruption. Between the archetypal Ideas of the intelligible world and the realities of the sensible world the relationship is one suggested by the Platonic term methexis, participation.

However, Mīr Dāmād’s vocabulary does not express the relationship in terms of either immanence or incarnation but in terms of prophetology and prophetic mission. Mīr Dāmād invites us to conceive the Platonic Ideas as prophets with a mission in this world. The prophetic philosophy of Shī’ism is a prophetological concept of Platonic philosophy which is as different from Christian Platonism, for example, as a prophetic religion of theophanies (tajelliyāt) from a religion of incarnation (tajassom). The function of the prophet is to bring about a meeting between Heaven and Earth, but it is a visionary theophanic meeting in the in-between world, the ‘ālam al-mithāl. Considering the many interpretations of Platonism that have been given over the centuries it seems to me that a royal and as yet little traveled road is offered here for investigation by comparative philosophy.

(2) Another theme as important as the preceding one originates in the work of Mullā Sadrā Shīrāzī (1050/1640). He was Mīr Dāmād’s most famous pupil whose genius and monumental work dominated Iranian philosophy for four centuries. Mullā Sadrā brought about a revolution in the metaphysics of being by reversing the order of priorities professed by the venerable metaphysic of essences. Before him the essences or quiddities were thought of as priorities and im-mutable. Whether existence were superadded to them or not, nothing changed in the constitution of these essences. Mullā Sadrā, on the contrary, gave priority to existence. It was the act and mode of existing that determined what an essence was. The act of existing was indeed capable of many degrees of intensification or degradation. For example, to the metaphysic of essences, the status of man or the status of the body is a constant. But to Mullā Sadrā’s existential metaphysic, being a man is possible in many degrees, from being a demon with a human face to the sublime condition of being the Perfect Man. What is called the body passes through a multitude of states from being a perishable body in this world to being a subtle or even a divine body (jism ilāhī). These changes always depend upon intensifications or attenuations (that is, degradations) in the act of existing. The thought that intensifications of being give life to our idea of the forms of being, of essences, is one of the main characteristics of his metaphysics. In itself it initiates a phenomenology of the act of existing.

This theme preoccupied a great part of Latin scholasticism in the West during the fourteenth century: de intensione et remissione formarum, of the intensification and attenuation (or remission) of forms. The idea supposes a space or field of variation within the limits of which variations of qualitative intensity can occur, the latitudo formarum. Among the philosophers of great fecundity and extraordinary subtlety who studied it profoundly was Jean de Ripa, an Italian Franciscan of the fourteenth century whose work is still far from completely published. Like Mullā Sadrā two and a half centuries later he had to contend with philosophers of less subtlety who believed they could keep the essences safe from these intensifying and degrading variations in the act of existing.

But dominating this problem and this epoch is the name of Nicolas Orésme, the Norman philosopher who was master at the College of Navarre and later bishop of Lisieux. His genius led him to take an entirely new step of inestimable significance. He undertook to represent qualitative variations graphically. Let us be sure we understand this. It had nothing to do with transposing into diagrams, as we do today, magnitudes which are already quantitative, as, for example, numbers or statistics. Not at all; with Nicolas it was a matter of showing correspondences between—that is, coordinating—data which were fundamentally and irreducibly qualitative, and representing them quantitatively, not with numbers but with geometrical figures (triangles, circumferences, trapezoids). Of course, the figures themselves as figures conceal a certain qualitative element; we should not forget that. What is particularly striking is that the point of departure from which these investigations started was theological. The theologians were asking themselves whether charity in a man could increase or decrease. Thus theology, to which it is now fashionable to deny any practical effectiveness, was at the root of a problem which exercised the natural philosophers (physiciens) of the University of Paris throughout the fourteenth century.

There was certainly reason to ask what the qualitative intensification of a sound or a color consists in. Does it consist in the disappearance of an old form, or in the addition of a new form to an old one? Are the happenings of the soul capable of intensification or diminution? Can the assent given to a proposition or belief become more or less intense? If so, in what does the increase or decrease consist?

The motif here is really the same as in Mullā Sadrā’s intensifications and attenuations of being, except that Nicolas develops it entirely differently from Mullā Sadrā. Orésme used geometrical configurations to represent variations in the qualities and movements of beings. In his figures he showed the extension of qualities and movements longitudinally and their intensity latitudinally. In this way he was able to represent geometrically the spaces that a moving object traversed with a variety of movements (that is, to take care of not only local movements but also of alternating qualitative movements). This undertaking is rendered even more captivatingly by a fourteenth century Iranian contemporary of Orésme’s, Haydar Amolī, distinguished for his taste and cleverness in making diagrams that gave geometrical configurations to suprasensible spaces. Only the standard of correspondence used in his diagrams is not the structure of geometrical figures but a relationship determined by the philosophical algebra known as the “science of letters” (’ilm-al-horūf). I don’t think any comparative study connected with this theme has been made.

In Nicolas Orésme’s quantitative expression of qualitative phenomena one essential point must not be forgotten. Nicolas sought, with the help of geometrical figures, a spatial intuition and imaginative contemplation of qualitative phenomena which by their essence escape dimensional representation. In this he even went along with the metaphysic of Imagination immanent in Proclus’s great commentary on Euclid’s Elements. Yet phenomenologically this is not the way to pass from qualitative science to the quantitative science of our time. I believe that the historians of science go too far in making Nicolas Orésme the precursor of analytical geometry. It never occurred to him to substitute an algebraic relationship for his geometric figures. That would even have destroyed the meaning of what he was attempting, his effort tending ultimately to show how time becomes space. For that reason I would rather say that the type of science he was trying to realize is still awaiting its true development. Certainly the status quaestionis that he left may have oriented others than himself in a new direction. But it is impossible to deduce any logical necessity for a change from one to the other. For the advent of analytical geometry Descartes was needed; he remains its first and last expression, and no logical necessity permits us to deduce Descartes from Nicolas. Therefore, as phenomenologists, let us rather explore the domain he opened for us with his inspired intuition. It is immense.

If you represent the subject within which qualitative variations occur as a line, then longitude and latitude are two coordinates representing these variations and together they constitute a surface. But if you begin by representing the subject as a plane (a surface) and study the quality informing every point on it, then, instead of a linear quality you have a superficial quality (the quality of a shallow surface). But this shallow-surface quality does not fulfill our idea of a quality. The subject informed by it is neither a line nor a surface but an out-and-out body. So the quality we are dealing with here is corporeal. If you go on now to represent the subject of the qualitative variations directly as a three-dimensional solid, you will be extending the sort of figurative representation initially employed for linear and superficial qualities to corporeal three-dimensional qualities. However, with such a three-dimensional representation filling what was previously the role of longitude, we need a fourth dimension of space to fill the role of latitude. Unfortunately no such fourth dimension is at our disposition.

Here, too, however, Nicolas Orésme had an inspired intuition. He thought of the corporeal quality as, in effect, made up of a twofold corporeality: that which results from the extension of the subject in three dimensions and another corporeality that is only imagined, which comes from the intensity of the quality multiplied by the number of surfaces traceable to the heart of the subject. I called this intuition inspired because—since it presupposes a fourth dimension—it results in the idea of corporeality as a whole reaching completion in the mundus imaginalis which it postulates and simultaneously attests. Now this is precisely the imaginal world of the subtle body that Henry More, the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist, called quarta dimensio, and it is certainly the same subtle imaginal world that Mullā Sadrā Shīrazī postulated and explored in his metaphysic where Imagination is transmuted into a purely spiritual faculty. Mullā Sadrā accepts the same postulate: a corporeality that does not reach completion in this three-dimensional, empirical world.

Deeply rooted in this idea too, for example, is the motif of heavenly archetypal temples. An earthly temple is not achieved, does not reach completion, with its construction in sensible three-dimensional space. Its totality is achieved in an invisibility, which can only be imagined. An Iranian philosopher, like Qāzī Sa’īd Qommī worked out the heavenly archetype of the cubical temple of the Ka’ba admirably in the seventeenth century. This motif in the Islamic gnosis corresponds to the Jewish motif of a temple in the Heavenly Jerusalem being the archetype of the temple in Jerusalem on earth.

As I have noted before, a more essential bond exists between the Platonists of Persia and those of Cambridge than the chronological date that makes them contemporaneous. Here again in the light of Nicolas Orésme’s studies, we see a field of comparative research opening up which is so new as to be a bit vertiginous. I do not press this theme upon you since I am only beginning to explore it. But I believe this is the time and place to point it out provisionally in passing. […]^***

4. The Western Experience and the Experience of Being Westernized

In conclusion it seems to me that themes such as these may have led us to a culminating point from which comparative philosophy, although still to come, nevertheless invites us here and now to a first ascent. From this culminating point we may perhaps be able to catch a glimpse in a new light of the facts of a problem that we can no longer banish from our view, that is, the confrontation between the destinies of East and West.

Suhrawardī’s concept of the “Orient,” and that of all his followers, is not something we can mark on our maps. With him the word has neither a geographic nor an ethnic, but a metaphysical meaning. It means the spiritual world, that major Orient where the sun of intelligibility takes rise, and “Orientals” are those whose inner dwellings receive the fire of that eternal aurora. Without doubt a number of such “Orientals” still exist in the geographical Orient as well as in the Occident of our world, but neither area has a preferential claim. Here, in speaking of the Orient and Occident, we will be using those words in their usual current meanings to ask ourselves what consequences will follow the disappearance of these formerly traditional civilizations.

We will, therefore, have to begin by differentiating in depth the Western experience from the Eastern experience of being Westernized. The latter is not simply an extension or prolongation of the former. There was a moment in the twelfth century, for example, when they were translating Avicenna into Latin in Toledo, and the cultures of the East and West conformed to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was not yet separated from its spiritual context. I am thinking now of those alchemists for whom the purpose of the operation performed in the laboratory was accomplished only when accompanied by an inner transformation of the man, that is, when it brought about an inner spiritual birth. There were of course other chemists who, ignoring that final spiritual birth, busied themselves at their furnaces hoping to realize ambitions in which they were always disappointed. These were called the souffleurs (puffers) or the charbonneux (charcoalburners). Certainly some of their results can be credited to the chapter preceding modern chemistry. On the other hand, alchemy as a spiritual discipline (for instance, Jaldaki as well as Jacob Boehme) certainly did not figure in any chapter of the prehistory of modern chemistry. There is a discontinuity here, a hiatus, a passage from one world to another. What we have to grasp to understand the respective destinies of East and West is the precise point where the hiatus occurs, the moment of passage. […]

What we are calling the Western experience is the application of intelligence to the scientific investigation of desanctified nature. In order to discover its laws and bring its forces under the control of man we have had to do violence to nature. That is what has brought us to where we are today. Undeniably a prodigious flight of technology has transformed the conditions of life and the whole world has benefited. However, it has simultaneously brought us to a situation that I shall call anti-demiurgic in the sense that it negates the work of creation by putting earthly men in a position to destroy and annihilate their habitation, the Earth where they originated and from which they draw subsistence. We must face this work of annihilation and death in order to denounce it, like the Sages of ancient Persia who were the first, if not the only ones, to look atrocious Ahriman in the eyes.

But beneath the prodigious effort of Western science to dominate, one thing should be noted: the existence of a spiritual asceticism (ascesis). Think of all the human lives whose sacrifice has been demanded by the discoveries of the West. When we take our comfortable places in an airplane with a sense of security—whether justified or not—we should think of all those who died at the beginning of the century to put us there. (I refer you to St. Exupéry’s Night Flight.) Think of the immense capital of intelligence invested in all the machinery now gradually covering the earth. What use is there in blaming the West when the rest of the world finds it necessary to imitate and even resemble it? But the confidence at the beginning of the century with which the West still believed that in developing technology it was moving toward happiness, toward regaining paradise, gives us the measure of its despair today, its sense that it has been defrauded and deceived and that the liberation of science has created an instrument of death. Nevertheless, I am convinced that this despair carries within itself the redemption of the West. Only that which secretes the poison can secrete the antidote. As Parsifal declares in Wagner’s opera, “The wound can be cured only by the weapon that made it.” I have confidence that there are in the West still enough “Orientals” in the Suhrawardīan sense of the word to undertake this salvation.

And the same is true, it seems to me, of the entirely different situation created by the Westernizing of the East (this time in the geographical sense of the word). To procure something and use it and adapt it is one thing. To discover it oneself is another. I mentioned earlier that the sociopolitical ideologies of the West are laicized and secularized versions of earlier theological systems. In this undoubted survival of the philosophical and theological sciences we are given, if not the only key, then at least one of the principal keys to our situation. All of us who are of the Ahl-al-Kitāb, the “community of the Book,” should therefore consider our theological past together. Our holy books, the Bible and the Koran, have faced us with the same problems to understand: you will recall that I said something earlier about the theological origin of the concept of hermeneutics, used so much today. But right there a decisive problem thrusts itself upon us. For I have noted in surveying the happenings in the spiritual world of the Shi’ite gnosis or mystical theosophy, ’erfan-e shī’ī, which I know quite well, that every time the Shi’ites came up against the same problems as the Christians, the solutions they opted for were those rejected by the official Christianism of the West.

This is why it is of capital importance for us to face the details of each others’ theological and philosophical history together. What has evolved into a laicized ideology in the West is not to be found in the East. So how can the choices and decisions of Western secularization be transposed to the East without violating or destroying it? This question brings a wholly new light, it seems to me, to our understanding of the crushing impact that the West has had upon the formerly traditional East. Here we cannot say, that which secreted the poison will itself secrete the antidote, because the poison was not secreted in the East. So what will happen? We are still in the midst of the process; it is still too soon to understand it or say what will happen. But it is not too soon to try to avert the dreaded catastrophe. I would say that the heavy responsibility to understand and meet this situation falls largely on comparative philosophy even though it does not yet have sufficient armament to face up to its task.

And what men will assume this responsibility? Men of the type who have traditionally been the flower of this Eastern culture. Such men are called ’orafā; they are mystical theosophers in whom high learning is indissolubly associated with high spirituality and high morality. In the spiritual tradition of the West the corresponding type of men supported the tradition until the trahison des clercs was declared. When the clergy become perfidious what remains is the type of man bred by modern desacralized culture who is commonly called an intellectual, and for him very often the word spirituality no longer has any meaning because in him the inner man has been destroyed by agnosticism. This means that a dissociation has taken place in him between thought and being, between being and doing. Such a dissociation was precisely what Suhrawardī wanted to prevent in putting forward the idea of the perfect Sage as one who would combine philosophical knowledge and spiritual experience, since neither can operate successfully without the other. It is these sages that a famous ḥadīth calls successors of the prophets.

And one of the most striking characteristics of Shi’ite philosophy in Iran—that is, of many thinkers in the last four centuries—is their insistence on the common vocation of philosophers and prophets. The prophet is not someone who predicts the future. He is one who utters the word of the invisible. For the Sages to appear as successors of the prophets their philosophy has to be in essence a prophetic philosophy And here again, I believe that a common trait exists among all the ’orafā, all the mystical philosophers belonging to the three branches of the Abrahamic tradition. This is a subject that could be reserved for another comparative philosophy program in the future. Only such men will be strong enough to confront the consequences of a desancti-fied and profaned universe. It is to them that the First Imām alludes in a famous conversation with his disciple, Kumayl ibn Ziyād. In this world such men belong as much to the East as to the West. They will never be more than a handful and, having renounced worldly ambition, they will never be known to the masses. But they will be, like their predecessors, aware of the moral and human responsibility of men of science. They will know that it is not enough to be just a man of science or just a philosopher to be a son of the Prophet.

Mohsen Fayz Kashani, who was without doubt Mullā Sadrā’s most brilliant pupil, terminates the preface of one of his books with a wish which ois at once a program and a profession of faith. He hopes that his book will bring light and peace to the hearts if seekers. He thinks of it as a treasury that will be waiting for him at the rendez-vous of the resurrection. But because he knows the weight of his secrets, he asks God to protect his book from contact with demons and “not to choose as repositories for his secrets any but the hearts of well-born men.” Wa’l-salam.

NOTES

^* See Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), preface to vol. 1.

^** The paragraphs omitted here concern the understanding of the Platonic ideas as angels and envoys in the work of Suhrawardī, and in Mīr Damad of the Ishpahan school whose thought is discussed by Corbin in a later chapter of his Philosophie iranienne et philosophie comparée (Tehran: Académie impériale iranienne de philosophie, 1977).

^*** The third theme concerns the “periodization” of the ages of the world as a cosmic dramaturgy which transcends, includes, and re-sacralizes historical events by revealing their hierophantic destiny within man, where history is interiorized into man rather than man inside and subject to history. Because, as the author says, he has treated this theme more fully elsewhere (in relation to Joachim of Flora), it has been omitted here. Cf. also Corbin, En Islam iranien, vol. 4, pp. 145–48 and 183–86.