I am often met, when discussing the discipline which I study, with a rather amused reaction. ”Oh, so you study philosophy. So can you tell me if this chair is really a chair?” is a popular sentence resembling a joke that comes up in the context. I see why it can be a rather funny thing to invest time and money into education in a field that has seemingly not produced any definite answers or consensus considering the questions that are asked within the enterprise of philosophy. Why, for instance, sit and doubt one’s own existence when it is so painfully apparent?

Mulla Sudra Shirazi (1571-1635), who is one of the most important figures of modern Arabic philosophy (ofter paralleled in importance with Avicenna), is known amongst other things for his ideas on existence and being. He begins with going against the more common sensical conception of the chicken-or-the-egg question when it comes to essence and existence. Analytically it seems as if existence is derivative from essence; how can there be such a thing as a horse in existence without there having been an essence of the horse which was to be manifested preceding. Shirazi proclaimed that this is just a misunderstanding, and that existence is in fact an all-encompassing reality, which can neither be described nor defined. This is due to the fact that existence is the only thing immediately grasped by the human mind, and that it needn’t be defined because of its immediate availability. It is a common notion shared by all beings (in the horizontal dimension of existence), that we all participate in being. Existence is real because the proposition ’X exists’ is true if and only if X refers to an actual thing in reality. So, what Shirazi means by stating that existence is a real predicate is that one acknowledges the subsistence in reality of an X by saying that it exists. To define something, one needs a broader analytic category. For example, when one is defining ’horse’, one needs the broader category of ’mammal’ (which would then need the broader category of ’animal’ and so on). As existence is all-encompassing (i.e. there is nothing for it to relate to in the sense of being more narrow than something else, there is nothing broader), it cannot be defined.

This little intellectual venture I went on in the previous paragraph, using the ideas of Mulla Sudra Shirazi as my vehicle, might not give any apparent answer to the standing question of what thinking about big things as existence is really use for. I feel like a proper philosopher when saying that there most probably is not a definitive response satisfying to all. According to Shirazi, philosophy takes the soul on four journeys. Through going on these voyages, first ascending to God and no longer being in denial of philosophy and later descending and returning to the world with the truth, the philosopher lives in the world with the highest principle (God), and has the ethical duty of communicating truths back to society. This is how philosophy cures sick souls, unveils the hidden, by philosophers starting to resemble (not become) the creator, helping others to think about things that must necessarily be thought about, such as life after death. So to answer the slightly doubtful questions anyone might have regarding my choice of study: I am doing you a favor. By embarking on these four journeys of the soul, I am one day to descend from the abstract truths of things back down to earth, resembling the creator, to salvage your sick souls that are oblivious to the importance of philosophy, becoming a link between God and the world. You don’t have to thank me, it is merely my moral duty to do so.

Sarcasm aside, I find subjective meaning in thinking about these things, as to me, there are no questions more profound than those having to do with existence itself, dived into by philosophers of all times and traditions. My interest does not have to necessarily be of any use to others outside myself, and I feel like the outreach of my influence is something partly out of my control anyway. I am just happy to have found an area that opens itself up to me as a playground that never seizes to amaze and baffle me in the best and worst ways.