Reza Hadisi is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Toronto, St. George. He works on questions in ethics, epistemology, imagination, and action theory through the lens of the history of philosophy.
A post by Reza Hadisi
In one of his commentaries, al‑Shahrazūrī (d. ca. 1288) cites and elaborates on an enigmatic passage from Suhrawardī (d. 1191), the founder of the Ishrāqī philosophical movement:
“If you hear of the discussion of the ancients that there is a magnitudinous world in existence, which is not the sensory world nor the intelligible; its cities are countless without end; among them are Jābalqā and Jābarsā… Believe in it!” (trans. Lit 2017)
The passage is cryptic, but for Suhrawardī it is not poetic flourish. He is referring to the notion of the ‘world of image’ [ʿālam al‑mithāl] and its “cities,” which he identifies as a distinct set of mind-independent objects (alongside sensible objects, Platonic forms, and souls). These, for him, are the proper objects of imagination.
Now, not many of us believe in the existence of Jābalqā and Jābarsā, or any other “cities of the world of image.” At best, we might be persuaded by the idea of imaginative construction: that episodes of imagining can generate quasi mental objects, and that these objects can be shared if the “construction script” is sharable. But Suhrawardī and his Ishrāqī commentators mean something far stronger. They do not think we construct these objects. They think we can discover them.
In a recent paper (Hadisi, forthcoming), I try to make sense of this medieval conception of imagination. Some of the reconstruction there is tied to Suhrawardī’s broader metaphysics. Here, I focus on just one basic idea concerning the constitutive norm of imagination.
Here is a familiar claim: unlike belief, imagination does not have truth or veridicality as a default standard of correctness. To be sure, as Amy Kind and others have emphasized, we can impose a voluntary truth constraint on an episode of imagining, for example, when we imagine whether penguins can fly (Kind 2016; Munro 2021). But when we do not impose such a constraint, we may freely imagine penguins flying over the CN Tower, and nothing seems wrong with that episode of imagining qua imagining.
Suhrawardī rejects this picture. On his view, one’s attempt to imagine penguins flying over Toronto can err in two ways:
● Error of apprehension: you might take what you imagine to be a mechanical bird rather than a penguin.
● Error of consequence: you might infer that there must be a storm in Toronto because you take flying penguins to entail rainy weather.
But what is wrong with imagining that the flying penguins are mechanical birds, or that a storm is brewing because of flying penguins?
According to Suhrawardī, the error is not that real penguins do not fly, or that flying birds do not cause storms. His claim is not that imagination must, in every use, track the actual world. Instead, he holds that imagination has a direction of fit from mind to the world of image.
The “world of image” is a term often used to refer to Suhrawardī’s strong realism about all possible objects of imagination. He maintains that these objects stand in partially determinate sets of possible relations to one another, forming infinite complexes or “cities” of interconnected images. Suhrawardī’s own examples show that these “images” encode visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and other kinds of information. Navigating this imaginal space requires grasping these intricate relations. I will set aside his reasons for endorsing this ontological liberalism, although in the paper I note why some of these reasons may appeal to those sympathetic to Platonism about abstract objects. Suhrawardī calls the individual objects that occupy this aspect of reality “suspended images” [muthul muʿallaqa].
For Suhrawardī, every act of imagining is intentionally directed toward some set of suspended images. Accordingly, when you imagine penguins flying over Toronto, you may create a mental image, but that is not the proper object of your imagination. Even in such fantastical uses, the created mental image is a device we use to grasp a set of mind‑independent interconnected suspended images corresponding to penguins flying over Toronto, other things being equal.
The ceteris paribus qualification is important because it helps explain the errors of apprehension and consequence described above. When you intend to imagine penguins flying over Toronto, if you instead latch onto an image of mechanical birds or infer a storm, you have failed to track the suspended image you meant to access. In other words, when we try to imagine a penguin flying, we aim to access a set of interrelated images that differ from the actual world under the aspect that penguins can fly, but not under other aspects. We would be reaching for the wrong set of interrelated images if we apprehend a world in which penguins are mechanical birds or their flying causes rain. Suhrawardī maintains that such interrelated images also exist, but our intentional act of imagining is always directed at one or another specific set.
These errors also reveal that, for Suhrawardī, imagination is not governed solely by what we intend to imagine. Intention selects the suspended image we aim to access, but the internal structure of those images constrains whether our imaginative act succeeds. Some things we might try to imagine are internally impossible, and some combinations of images cannot coexist. Because suspended images are mind‑independent, the imaginal world cannot contain impossible objects. Imagination is therefore answerable to the internal and external structure of its objects, not just to our stipulations.
To make things a little less confusing, it is useful to look at Suhrawardī’s attempt to give a unified analysis of two different cases of imagining: extramental imagining and imagining “in the mind.” Both, he argues, involve using a sensible device to access an object in the world of images.
The extramental case: Suppose I am watching this scene from The Mirror:
Still from The Mirror, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1975)
Assuming that appreciating this scene requires imaginative engagement, we may ask: what is the object of imagination here? The shapes and colors on the TV screen are not themselves the objects of imagination. But neither is the object of imagination located on the film set, where there are cameras, crew, and equipment, none of which belong to the portion of the world of images we intend to access.
On Suhrawardī’s account, the pixels on the screen are a vehicle through which I access a structured complex of images (visual, auditory, affective, and so on) that hang together in determinate ways under some aspects and indeterminate ways under others. A given vehicle can allow access to only some suspended images. What determines which suspended images count as the proper targets of our imaginative access is always a matter of intention. Sometimes that intention lies with the audience, who directs their own imaginative act; sometimes it lies with another person who invites us to imagine alongside them. Suppose I want to engage the movie scene in a way that tracks Tarkovsky’s intention. In that case, if I imagine a phone in the woman’s pocket, I have accessed the wrong suspended image (“I have wandered into the wrong city!”). Of course, I could instead intend to access a different city altogether, one in which she does pull out a phone and scroll through Instagram. Suhrawardī’s account does not imply that this sort of imagining is necessarily nonveridical. What matters is simply that, in each case, there is a fact of the matter about which suspended image I am trying to reach and whether I succeed. After all, my imagination could be intentional under the description of watching the film in a way that conflicts with Tarkovsky’s intention.
The mental case: Now consider the ordinary case where I close my eyes and imagine penguins flying over Toronto. Here, Suhrawardī deploys the notion of a mental image, but in a way that reverses the usual picture. The mental image is not the object of imagination. Just as the object of imagination is not on the TV screen, the mental image is not the imaginative object. It is the interface or sensible device that enables access to the suspended image.
The account is therefore unified. Whether I am watching a film, reading a novel, daydreaming, or imagining my dinner, I am always doing the same thing: using a sensible vehicle, in an intentional form, to access an interrelated set of visual, tactile, auditory, and other images. And because these objects are mind‑independent, imagination inherits a norm of correctness that is not optional or voluntary. It is built into its very constitution.
In my paper I say more about Suhrawardī’s metaphysics of suspended images and his distinction between them and Platonic forms. Suhrawardī sometimes treats suspended images as archetypes and sometimes as vague entities, and I am still trying to see how these descriptions fit together. My next question is whether the standards of correctness that govern imagination, understood as being answerable to the mind‑independent structure of its objects, require this particular metaphysical profile or could rest on a different metaphysics. Clarifying what sort of entities suspended images are seems crucial for assessing both the coherence of Suhrawardī’s view and the promise it holds.
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Author’s Note: I wrote this piece just before the most recent protests in Iran against the current criminal regime. Anyone who studies Iran’s intellectual and philosophical traditions owes a deep debt to those who are now defending the possibility of free thought and expression in Iran.
References
Hadisi, Reza (forthcoming). “Imagination and Its Object: Recovering Suhrawardī’s Suspended Images”. Philosophers' Imprint.
Kind, Amy. 2016. “Imagining Under Constraints.” In Knowledge Through Imagination, Ed. Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 145–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lit, L.W.C. van. 2018. The World of Image in Islamic Philosophy: Ibn Sīnā, Suhrawardī, Shahrazūrī and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Munro, Daniel. 2021. “Imagining the Actual.” Philosophers’ Imprint 21 (17).
Shahrazūrī, Shams al-Dīn. ca.1286/2001. Sharḥ Ḥikmat Al-Ishrāq. Ed. Hossein Ziai. Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies.