Abstract

The relationship between the soul and the body is one of the most fundamental issues in philosophical anthropology. Mullā Ṣadrā’s Transcendent Philosophy, grounding reality in the principiality of existence (aṣālat al-wujūd) as a unitary, graded, and fuzzy reality, offers a novel approach to this problem. In this view, the human being is a fluid, fuzzy reality in which the soul and the body constitute two levels of a single existence. The present study, employing a descriptive‑analytical method and drawing on Mullā Ṣadrā’s principal works, examines the consequences of this fuzzy anthropology for the relationship between theoretical and practical reason. The findings indicate that the foundation of Ṣadrian philosophy rests on the principiality of existence as a graded and fuzzy reality. The human being is a unitary, graded reality called “soul” from one aspect and “body” from another; the soul is the product of the body’s substantial motion (al-ḥarakah al-jawharīyyah), and their relation is one of union and ultimately unity. On the basis of the rule “the soul in its unity is all powers” (al-nafs fī waḥdatihā kull al-quwā) and the fuzzy view of the human being, any absolute demarcation among the soul’s faculties is eliminated. The conventional distinction between theoretical reason (the faculty of cognition) and practical reason (the faculty of motivation) is transformed: they are two dimensions of a single reality called “reason,” just as soul and body are two levels of a single reality. Contemplation is the higher level of action, and action is the lower level of contemplation. The goal of both is one: existential perfection and nearness to God. The study concludes that Mullā Ṣadrā’s fuzzy anthropology, by moving beyond Aristotelian binary logic, leads to the ontological unity of soul and body and, consequently, to the essential unity of theoretical and practical reason.