وجود و حضور در كتاب المشاعر حكيم ملاصدرا

Existence and Presence in Mulla Sadraʹs al-Mashair

In the study of the kind of existence the field of philosophy seeks, it seems that the concept of presence, as something that brings existence and knowledge together, unites each level of existence with one level of knowledge and matches their degrees and levels with each other. Accordingly, presence is the very gradation of the levels of existence, which not only presents us with a spectrum of the gradual appearance of events and affairs, but also reveals to us the stages of mental journey on the basis of knowledge acquisition over time, with a mind that is already aware of the gradation of its elevated presence. And in this way, it places us in the route of the degrees of entclechy from the origin to the end. Therefore, as Mulla Sadra interprets the issue, it seems that the barrier to the unity of being will be removed when the concept of existence is specified as presence. He explicitly maintains that such a concept of existence is the same as presence. The degree of gradation determining the locus of the existential act of each existent depends on its presence with respect to itself, as well as the affairs that are present to it. At each level of the mental ascending journey, a degree of existence, due to its absence in relation to itself, declines and, in this way, the macrocosm and microcosm reflect the degrees of the perfection of each other at a specific level.