‘The Degrees of Existence’ in the Transcendent Wisdom and Peripatetic Philosophy with an Emphasis on the View of Allamah Khafri

An explanation of the way one looks at existence is one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy. ‘The degrees of existence’ seeks to clarify a dimension of this important problem. The Peripatetic philosophers view existence as a multiplicity in which the various beings of the universe are completely different from one another. According to this viewpoint, existence is a collection of beings that share nothing in common with one another. Therefore, the presentation of ‘the degrees of existence’ is meaningless in this philosophical school of thought. Theorists in this school of thought have said that ‘the levels of beings’ imply a series of varying categories of beings that are either strong or weak in their existence. Allamah Shams al-Din bin Ahmad al-Khafri, a great philosopher and theologian of the tenth century A. H. , believed that existence possessed two meanings, i. e. ‘being’ and ‘the source from which being is abstracted’. This paved the way for a new outlook towards existence that was distinct from that of the Peripatetic philosophers. His treatise that was entitled, ‘the Levels of Existence, ’ has elucidated this theory. Following this, in his Transcendent Wisdom, Mulla Sadra presented vital philosophical premises such as ‘gradation in existence’ that helped perfect the idea of the ‘levels and degrees of existence.