From the Imaginary Cognition to the Imaginal World: A Survey of the Place of Images in Suspense in Suhrawardi's Philosophy

The trichotomy of the cosmos into dominion, heaven and omnipotence corresponds to the three partite nature of human understanding including sensation, imagination and intelligence. Accordingly, the senses are the gates through which man recognizes the material world, his imagination is the traveller on the road to heavens and his intelligence is the seeker of the dominant lights.Shahab Addin Suhrawardi, titled as the ‘Master of Illumination’, focused his endeavours on the images in suspense as the detached imagination, and in this direction he considered himself as the heir of the Iranian sages and the Greek wises. The world of images in suspense, which is different from the world of Platonic archetypes, is created byequivalent intellects. It is a vast world derived from illuminated archetypes which contains an instance of each creature in the material world.