User:Da1andonly68/Jambet Act of Being

Christian Jambet is a student of Henry Corbin(whose interpretations of Avicenna influenced Jacques Lacan). He is the author of The Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation in Mullā Sadrā. The description from Google Books:

This recent study by Christian Jambet explores the essential elements of the philosophical system of Mullā Sadrā Shīrāzī, an Iranian Shi‘ite of the seventeenth century. The writings of Mullā Sadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1640) bear witness to the divine revelation in every act of being, from the most humble to the most eminent.

More generally, Islamic philosophy employs an ontology of the real that is important to the destiny of metaphysics, an ontology that belongs to our own universe of thought. Jambet’s brilliant study seeks to make sense of this intuition of the real, nourished by the Sufism of Ibn al-‘Arabī, the philosophy of classical Islam, the thought inherited from the Greeks, and the esoteric and mystical dimension of Shi‘ism.

Mullā Sadrā saw the world as moving ceaseless...

Table of Contents

• Preface to English-language Edition
  
• Introduction
  
• Part One The Metaphysical Revolution
  
  • I The Witness of the Real
    
  • II The Light of Being
    
  • III The Avicennian Moment
    
  • IV Freedom and Intensity
    
• Part Two The Existential Revolution
  
  • V Essential Motion
    
  • VI Births of the Soul
    
  • VII The Imagination
    
• Part Three Salvation
  
  • VIII A Philosophy of Spirit
    
  • IX The Return into God
    
  • X The God of Epiphanies
    
• Notes
  
• Index of Names
  

Themes

Neoplatonism
In the Introduction, Jambet writes:

We cannot separate the flourishing of Islamic metaphysics, understood as a system of knowledge that says the real of all reality, from another important event, namely the adoption of Neoplatonic schemes by Isma'ili Shite thinkers in the tenth century. This Ismaili decision is contemporaneous with the construction of the systems of al-Farabi and Avicenna. It engendered a number of theses on the nature of the first principle and on the instantiation and emanation of existents. These theses culminate in a radical apophatism, opening a disjunction between a real that is not "being," that is not even "principle," that is not "one" -- except in a paradoxical sense -- and what is called "the principle" but has no foundation in this first real, from which, however, it is enigmatically instantiated, and which is thought under the concept of a "prime instantiated," or "Prime Intelligence."[Note 8; translation comment] This approach to the real, comparable in its force to the procuedure of Proclus or especially Damascius, receives a lengthy and polemical treatment in the works of the Qarmatian and Fatimid theoreticiains, from Nasafi to Hamid al-Din Kirmani (d. 408/1017). The inflections introducted by later Isma'ili systems of thought, particularly in the highly eventful period beginning with the proclamation of the "great resurrection" in 559/1164, also belong, quite rightly, to the history of Islamic metaphysics and cannot be reduced to a nonphilosophical "gnosis"

Monad
In II The Light of Being:

It is obviously rather difficult to conceive of what a "monad of existence" might be, since the monad seems to be defined rather as a singular esssence that is determined by its quiddity and whose being owes everything to this quiddity. But, in truth, this is not so. Thinkers on the monad, from Proclus to Leibniz, insisted on Proclus's remarkable statement "All that perpetually comes to be has an infinite potency of coming to being." And the remarks that follow this proposition would fit quite well within the Sadrian doctrine of the act of being: "All true being is infinite in that it has an inextinguishable life, and unfailing substance, and an undiminished activity...Its infinitude is in respect to potency. Accordingly, what renders it indivisible makes it also infinite, and a being is more infinite in proportion as it is more one and indivisible." This indivisibility -- which is infinity itself -- is expressed in the monadic singularity of each act of being. The monadic acts of being, these pure singularities, return to the fundamental unity that is the source of their flow -- the source, that is, of the expression of the infinity that constitutes them, the expansion of their joy--and they are converted into the primordial instantiator, God. The differentiation of the simple act of being, according to its degrees, is modalization. Here, too, Sadra seems to be very close to Proclus: "All things are in all, but in each one according to its proper mode." The law of differentiation proceeds according to distinctions of priority (causativity in expression) or posteriority (the fact of being caused), greater or lesser intensity in the act of being, "confirmation in being" or "ontological deficiency"

Proclus and The Imagination
Note 85 for VII The Imagination:

The imagination thus becomes the vehicle of the soul. Henry Corbin compared this conception with that of Proclus and his view of "perpetual bodies" and the "middle vehicle" of the soul. On closer examination, however, it appears that the concept of the "middle vehicle" is based entirely on the Platonic notion of the soul, and Suhrawardi's philosophy of the imagination, as we are examining it here, has no place in its definition there. The text referred to by Jean Trouillard designates an intermediate status between the sensibles and the intelligibles, but nothing that resembles the imaginal world. We must say, rather, that the ishraqi doctrine imposed something on the Proclusian scheme that is in no way valorized in it, and that following Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra interpreted the median degree of the soul in terms of the imagination and the configuration of the psychic body. See Trouillard, L'un et l'ame selon Proclos(Paris: Belles Lettres, 1972), p. 187, and Proclus, Commentaire sur le "Timee," trans. A.J. Festugiere (Paris: Vrin, 1967), vol 3, p. 340ff. This also applies to the vehicle of the soul in the tradition of the Chaldean Oracles; see Yochanan Lewy, Chaldeaean Oracles and Theurgy: Mysticism, Magic and Platonism in the Later Roman Empire (Cairo: Institut francais d'archelogie orientale, 1956), p. 178ff. The imaginal world, in the sense meant by the Ishraqiyah, takes on the function of the ether, the sun, the moon, and the air, fragments of which form the "vehicle of the soul."

Lacan
The impact of Avicenna upon Jacques Lacan is mentioned in III The Avicennian Moment pg 143:

"...Avicenna's definitions of the possible, the impossible, and the necessary, which are for him the only three 'states' of the existent as existent. He says that it is difficult to define these three modalities and that the ancients, from whom we inherit these terms, did not escape the vicious circle. Indeed, when they wanted to define the possible, they included in its definition either the impossible or the necessary. And when they wanted to define the impossible, they included in its definition either the necessary or the possible.

The three modalities form, as it were, three circles that implicate one another and are all bound together (in a manner that is somewhat analogous to the weaving together of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary in the Lacanian schema). It is impossible to separate one of the modalities from the others without dissolving all three of them into inconsistency. Just as Lacan grants a certain primacy to the real among the three circles, Avicenna considers the necessary dimension of being 'the one that must be represented as primary.' This comparison of the two schemata is not arbitrary. In his way, Lacan is a distant heir to Avicenna. But he is a very unfaithful heir, and willfully so: the real, which in a certain sense has primacy over the symbolic and the imaginary, is more analogous to the impossible than to the necessary. In the Lacanian schema, the real is analogous to the impossible, the symbolic to the necessary, and the imaginary to the possible.

Giving priority to the circle of the real over the two other circles involves a decision concerning being that is opposed to Avicenna's decision(a decision that governs all of Western ontology up to Leibniz and Hegel). It is an attempt to put an end to the Avicennian moment I am outlining here. I say this in order to emphasize Avicenna's decision, to underline its tremendous importance. For Avicenna, the necessary is first. It is what we must begin with..."

Selection from Index of Names

Lacan, 143.
Proclus, 25, 97, 475 n.85.