نفس و خلاقيت هاي آن

The Soul and its Creative Acts

According to Islamic philosophers, the soul performs two kinds of activily. The first type is the direct act, which is caulled the self-dependent act in the terminology of Islamic philosophy, and which can be put versus Emanation. In this kind of activity, the act is emanated from the soul, so that there is no intermediary between the source of emanation (the soul) and the emanated (the product of the act). The source of emanation is always present and is absolutely annihilated immediately after the disappearance of the emanated. When man imagines the shape of a one hundred-storey tower in his mind, the mental tower is emanated from the soul, which is present in the receptacle of its existence, and immadiately after any kind of negligence or lack of attantion, there would remain no trace of the tower. The second type of the activities of the soul include those matters which are realized outside the mind, such as a plan that an engineer draws for a building. In fact, the essence of the plan is of the type of the first group of activities: i.e, the direct acts of the soul, and has been developed in the engineerʹs mind. However, the form reflected in the outside as the plan belongs to the second class of activities, in the sense that the soul of the engineet would play no role in its subsistence and even if the engineer himself dies out, his plan will subsist. With respect to the two types of the soulʹs acts, logical considerations force us to agree with two types of objects, namely, Subjective Object and Objective Object. Mulla Sadra refers to this classification as "Known by essence" and "Known by accident". Two of the other creative acts of the soul are perceiving universals and creating artistic works. Art is one of the beautiful manifestations of the creative nature of manʹs soul and has attracted the attention of the philosophers of Ancient Greece since long ago. Islamic teachings, too, have extensively dealt with this issue.