Reconstruction of Mulla Sadra's View on Beauty and Art

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Professor at Imam Sadiq University

Abstract

Because of using principles such as principality, unity, gradation of existence and concomitance between existence and unity, along with an exhaustive understanding of Ibn Sina's philosophical principle about our knowledge of unity and multiplicity, Mulla Sadra believed new philosophical-aesthetical principles such as principality, unity and gradation of beauty, though he didn't use these terms explicitly. We can reconstruct implicit Mulla Sadra's theory on art by considering his view on typology of human beings, cognation of cause and effect, and the fact that creating art is a kind of causality. Therefore, we have four kinds of art: theocentric, passionate, indignational and satanic. The real art is the theocentric one and the other three are pseudo. Satanic whispering, as an exterior cause, and estimation faculty, as an interior one, play the main role in keeping human beings occupied with passionate, indignational and satanic pseudo arts.

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