مساله كينونت نفوس قبل از ابدان در فلسفه ملاصدرا

The Problem of the Existence of Souls before Bodies in Mulla Sadraʹs Philosophy

How does the philosophical principle of "the soul is corporeal in origination, but spiritual in subsistence" comes into agreement with the teachings of Divine Law refering to the existence of human soul prier to the origination of the material body and the general principle of "all things return to their origin?" Mulla Sadra solves this problem by resorting to three principles: "the principiality of being", "the gradation of existence", and "the simple truth is all things". In Mulla Sadraʹs view, such an existence of the soul is based on the issue of causality, or as he explains, the existence of the truth before the descended being, which not only conforms to the existence of the cause before the effect and the existence of the archetype before the ectype, but is also the same as it. Such priority is essential and possesses at least two existential aspects: the rational aspect and the imaginal aspect. Moreover, by the corporeal origination of the soul and its spiritual subsistence, the writer does not mean the origination of the reality of human soul, the fixed entities of particular souls, or the source and resurrection of the soul. Rather, he means the two prior (worldly) and posterior (otherworldly) aspects of the soul. What is more, on the basis of the parallelism and proportion among the stages of the descent and ascent arcs, each of the levels of the soul in the arc of descent has an equivalent in the are of ascend. And finally, the soul enters the world of immaterial intellects as a result of the completion of the body.