Sadra discussed the elements of his theory in four of the nine volumes (I, II, III, IIX) of his extensive and complex books so called Asfar ² in a very sophisticated complex of logical, ontological, epistemological and mystical idioms, metaphors and abstract ideas. As it has been expressed by his commentators like Kompani, ³ it seems too difficult to catch the depth of his theory; perhaps because he sometimes goes beyond the conceptual, eidetic thought and requires us to sympathize with him in his apprehending the truth. In this article, I am not concerned with all aspects of his theory of the self, nor to detect all the elements of the Sadraean perspective. All that I want to do here is the examination of his description of the reality of the self, which is for him a unitary consciousness. For Sadra, the reality of self is hidden in its special mode of being.⁴

As Sadra says, and presupposes, man is the only full-hand script of God (Noskhih i kamel i Ilahi) among the beings, a microcosm in macrocosm, to this latter the former corresponding ⁵ by way of wisdom-- that is, the performative self's mystical experience of Being. In a Heideggerian manner, Sadra also maintains that it is only man that has this special being among the others, but unlike Heidegger who locates this specialty in the temporality of Dasein's nature, Sadra underlines on God’s devotion of man to Himself; this is, Sadra believes, what makes man's existence special.⁶ However in agreement with Heidegger, Sadra holds that the nature of the self can not be grasped by analytically eidetic reflection. The reason is quite obvious from his perspective: the nature of the self is his special being and being cannot be caught by essential thought simply because being is not a category to be essentials and conceptualised then understood by the eidetic reflection. To apprehend the nature of the self, we need to leave the eidetic thought and to sympathetically come up in the light of Being; if so, we would then experience the being of the self. Otherwise, the nature of the self always remains mysterious, as easily seen in Husserl's phenomenology, far beyond our reflective understanding. This is why Sadra in his description of the nature of being, starts from the structure of Being itself not, as Heidegger does, from the analysis of the being of the self. Instead to see the being of man in the horizon of temporality, Sadra considers it in the context of Being itself. He considered that Being manifests itself in the form of beings in such a hierarchic (Tashkiki) manner that they are continuously everlastingly hanging on it so that, if it deprives them from its light they will nihiliate. Applying this theory to the nature of the self, this manifestation implies a double nature for the self in particular: The self is hanging on (i.e., being illuminated in the illuminative terminology) and present to (i.e., being absorbed) Being at the same time. It is this double nature of the self that makes him special among the beings; that is, while all beings are manifested and illuminated entities from Being, it is only the self that is absorbed in Being at the same time. The reason is that the absorption is, according to him, an experientially sympathetically conscious presence before Being. It is its factual practice in everydayness (in Heidegger's term), and, in Sartrean terms, the unbounded unreflective consciousness. This kind of presence, that is, this kind of existential, non-reflective, unitary consciousness is what makes the self-distinct from the other beings. It is this consciousness, Sadra says, that is the basis of our actual life and the source of our concrete, social, moral aspects, as well as our intentional, reflective thought. Such a consciousness is already approved by the illuminative mystics when they spoke of their higher mystical experiences; however, it has not been theorized in a philosophical manner; nor has it been justified for our ordinary life while we are not mystics. It was Sadra who elaborated first such a mystical idea in the form of a philosophical theory so that he applied it to our experientially ordinary life. The nature of the self is this unitary consciousness which covers all aspects of the self's life simply because this consciousness is his special mode of being. We will see this point in following sections.

Sadra built up the reality of the self as a special being that thanks to its illuminative nature has a mere eternal dependency on Being. This, Sadra holds, allows us to consider the self as a factual presence immersed and absorbed in Being itself rather than to consider it as a merely transcendental subject who stands beyond our consciousness--as one may see in Husserlian theory. Rather, Sadra moves in a similar way in which Heidegger and the existential philosophers move later. Dasein is introduced and defined by them as "being-in-the-world". Dasein cannot be distinguished from its existence in the world. Therefore, it makes no sense to suppose that we know ourselves better than we know the world (Being for Sadra and later Heidegger), and it makes no sense to say that we know about ourselves in a different way than we know about the world. We know the world and ourselves identically, for ourselves (as Dasein) and the world constitute a single phenomenon:

The compound expression 'Being-in-the-world' indicates the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unitary phenomenon.⁷

Just as they consider the self as Dasein that is as a being-in-the-world who has an entic-ontological structure in the horizon of temporality, Sadra also considers the self as a being absorbed in-the-Being itself, that is as a being-present-before-Being who has preontological structure; and this implies the self to be in the world as a factual, live, vital and performing reality rather than as an abstract, transcendental (in Kantian, Husserlian sense) or epistemological presupposition as we may see in the modern subjectivistic philosophy. For Sadra, as for the existential phenomenologists, the self is already a being whose 'facticity' is a pure need to supply his perfection; and this implies the self to be already involved in the order of being before falling in the order of concept. The self is absorbed and immersed in Being through which the self journeys to discover its mysterious land. To be so is, for Sadra as for Heidegger, to be present: present before Being (in-the- world for Heidegger) which implies its present for itself. To this implication Sadra applies a special name: the unitary consciousness which will concerns us from the next section onward. Instead we would now turn here to Sadraean notion of absorption, i.e., the presence before (or in) Being to depict its meaning a bit more so far as the reality of the self as unitary consciousness is concerned.

Through his detailed discussions, Sadra arrives at a position of understanding how to situate the self as presented before Being. As hinted, he uses the words "absorption" and "immersion" to indicate this peculiar situation of the self. When the whole reality of the self as an illuminative being is nothing but a pure existential dependency on Being, the state of "absorption" or "immersion" in Being does not seem odd, or, to use a stronger word, inconceivable for Sadra. The special dependency which indicates "hanging on," and being "held by," Being, is, according to Sadra, implies the self to be absorbed and immersed in Being. Such absorption is, for Sadra, a fulfilment to be achieved by the self through its preontological experiences. It is, Sadra holds, the whole existential feature of the self as a pure, illuminative existence to be "immersed in" Being. It is its very existence, which it is not even possible to think of except in the light of thinking of Being, which is its substantive ground for being.

From a subjectivistic point of view we may of course always think of our selfhood independent of thinking of any principle; and it clearly denies the validity of such a Sadraean analysis of the selfhood as a pure, illuminative existence absorbed in Being. This is so, a subjectivist may say, because if it were the case that the self, thanks to be totally dependent on another, could not even be independently understood and thought of, it would be impossible for us to ever have had the impression of our selfhood on its own. But the fact that we do have the idea of our selfhood on its own counts as sufficient reason for believing that the self is not totally dependent on another in this extreme sense of absorption.

Sadra answers such a point of view: this so-called impression of the selfhood is the introspective self which comes into the mind through the conceptualisation and introspection of the factual performative truth of the self. The illuminative reality of the self rather is the performative one which talks, feels, thinks, wishes, judges, decides, and has sensation, imagination, and intellection, and is acquainted with all these acts and powers of its apprehension. The performative self is that which always acts and perceives and is never acted upon, or perceived, by itself or by another, except through conceptualisation. Everyone can, by way of introspection, conceptualise the factual reality of his own selfhood as well as those of others. Despite this understanding, it should not be maintained that our impression of the self is the very reality of the self or even a real and truthful representation of it.

If we make a pedagogical statement by saying, for example, " 'by another' is a special phrase", the phrase 'by another', as the subject matter of this particular statement, is not really being used with its proper special nature. This is not a substitution instance of a preposition at all; and, for that matter, it cannot be a true representation of the objective reality of 'by another'. Rather, it is a merely introspective conceptualisation of that reality which we speak of in the factual circumstances of our ordinary language. But if I say, in a normal instance, that "I am sitting by the window," or "the self is dependent on Being," I have truly used these prepositions with their own objective meanings. This is because their reality is illustrated by given examples instead of by generalisation and conceptualisation.

If an illuminative being, such as the self, is expressible only in terms of a special phrase, e.g., "by" or "on" and so on, its reality, too, like any other preposition, Sadra argues, will not be understandable unless it is absorbed into the meaning of Being. An introspection and representation of a special phrase is a complete distortion and, in a way, a falsification of the objective truth of such a linguistic entity. Likewise, Sadra maintains, an introspection of the self is an illusory representation of its existential reality, and cannot be taken as its true representation. In illuminative language, the word "illusory" is frequently used to signify this, that is, to conceptualise and interpret the unitary truth of a reality which can never truly and exactly be represented.

It is worth of noting here that the illuminative philosophy denies that the self can ever know itself, and still less be known by others, through representation. Thus the independent impression that we may have from the selfhood of ourselves can never characterize the truth value of the reality of the self as it exists in another. This reality, as we will see, can only be apprehended through the unitary consciousness.

Since the reality of the self is nothing but a special being, that is, an existential presence before Being, the self then is hanging on Being which is eternal and absolute perfection. That is to say, the self cannot be thought of accurately as distinguished from Being which is the principle of its being. Such as it is, this existential reality of pure dependence upon Being gives rise to the notion of a kind of existential "absorption." This means that the reality of the self as an illuminative entity is to be known as some thing "over-absorbed" in Being. As Sadra analysed, this illuminative sense of absorption is, therefore, directly derived from the existential meaning of the special truth of emanation, namely, "dependence on", "issuing from," "held by," and so on. However, Sadra maintains that the self outstands-- in a Heideggerian term-- amongst the beings due to its presence before Being; that is, the self absorbed in Being can experience its illuminative being so that through its everydayness it can catch its reality in an absolutely mystically preontological apprehension called 'the unitary consciousness’.⁸

Therefore, absorption in Being, which is presence before Being, as ultimately understood by Sadra, is a living, performative, non-reflective and preontological experience which in its high form shapes the mystical apprehensions and in its ordinary form shapes our commonsensical experiences and inspirations throughout our everydayness life. This current experience of Being, 'the unitary consciousness', that the self possesses by its absorption in Being (or, to borrow Heidegger's phrase, by its being-in-the-world), builds up the factual reality of the self as a being-toward-perfection (al wojood al taleb li al kamal):

Sadraean 'self' then like Heideggerian 'Dasein' and Sartrean 'for-itself' continuously is in the process of realising its existential potentialities. It is for Sadra the authentic root of all what we have, do and know, ¹⁰ and since Sadra maintains that absorption is experience of the very illuminative being the self is, then it can easily be seen that this experience, i.e., the unitary consciousness is identified with the being of the self. Not only this, since the illuminative reality of the self can only be grasped in this unitary consciousness, then the unitary consciousness, it can be concluded, is the being of the self. In this relation Sadra clearly writes that this consciousness:

He ultimately says that we can not logically define this consciousness, just as we can not define our special 'being'.¹² We only grasp it in our living experience of Being, because there is no representation of this consciousness.¹³ However, it does not deprive us to reflectively assign a conceptual essence to it and think of it. This reflective thinking of it, however, can not show its reality to us, because such thinking itself is grounded by that existential consciousness.¹⁴

Sadra does not believe that in the order of being there is an interruption between the self and the unitary consciousness.¹⁵ In this respect Sadra writes:

And after attempting to demonstrate this thesis, he concludes that the reality of him- self is "his existence, and his consciousness of his individual (Shakhsi) existence is realised only by presence of this existence".¹⁷

The self and the unitary consciousness are separating from each other only metaphorically, as when we introduce the notion of the self 'behind' such a consciousness. ¹⁸ The unitary consciousness which is a factual experience of and an preontological presence before Being consists the being of the self; in other words, it is the self simply because it is, indeed, the experience of no-self (self in its subjectivistic sense) or, to use a mystical term, of "emptiness" (fana).¹⁹

In such a discussion Sadra may again be regarded as a forerunner of existential phenomenologists in rejection of the subjectivistic notion of consciousness and the transcendental self.²⁰ Just as in Heidegger and Sartre,²¹ we already found in Sadra that both notions of 'consciousness' and 'self' fell with the denial of the transcendental subject, as we found in Kant, Hegel, and Husserl (all after Descartes) that the affirmation of the cogito was at the same time an affirmation of both the existence of consciousness and the self. A comparison between Sadra and Sartre here may make the case more clear.²² Sartre, in particular, takes the existence of consciousness as his beginning. His denial of the transcendental self is not a denial of consciousness or existential self which as Sadra he seems to identify as 'for-itself'. This consciousness seems to be for Sartre as for Sadra existential and an openly performative practical experience. For both of them, the acts of consciousness provide us with a describable starting point; there are no acts of an 'underlying' or transcendental self. Consciousness is analysed not as a knowing consciousness or as a primarily reflecting consciousness, but rather as an active, 'living' consciousness. While Sadraean thesis rejects Descartes', Kant's, and Husserl's theory which takes thinking and knowing as the essential conscious acts, it somehow agrees with Sartrean position underlying that consciousness is first of all a perceiving, feeling, mobile consciousness. Consciousness is first of all a practical, a 'non-reflective' consciousness. As already indicated, the unitary consciousness is, according to Sadra 'preontological', meaning that it is existentially primordially a factual lived experience. In a more or less same manner, we may see a similar tone in Heidegger and Sartre. For Heidegger and Sartre practical or 'ontic' acts are more 'primitive' or 'original' than acts of 'ontological' cognition. In Sadra, this insistence on precognitive intentional performative experience, i.e., the unitary consciousness is carried through consistently and persuasively; in his analysis, the traditional dualisms between mind and body, subject and object are discarded in favour of the notion of being-present-before-Being-- a notion which sounds like the Heideggerian conception of "being-in-the-world".

In the light of the above remark, it may easily be seen that the "intentionality" which is the crucially central keystone in Husserlian eidetic consciousness finds no room in Sadraean preontological unitary consciousness simply because the latter belongs to the order of being in which the unitary consciousness, the experience of Being, genetically existentially acts, not intentionally that bears a subjectivistic tone. The Husserlian concept of 'intentionality', if has any meaning for Sadra at all, should be, in agreement with Sartre, stripped of its Husserlian heavily cognitive connotations and becomes equivalent to the concept of 'mobility'. The self, according to Sadra, is conscious, not of his being, but through his being. This is why he says that the unitary consciousness is an existentially building up of the being of the self; a currently continuously process of going ahead toward perfection (sayrorat ila al kamal). The paradigm of an intentional act, then, in agreement with Sartre, is not "I think" or "I know," but "I can."

However, like Sartre who believes that the existential consciousness is dependent by its nature,²³ Sadra also goes on, as already seen, to say that consciousness is absolutely nothing apart from its source, i.e., Being, and it always remains dependent, 'unfulfilled', and 'incomplete' (in Sartre's word: "decompression of Being"). This leads Sadra to maintain, with Heidegger, Sartre and post-Heideggerians like Rorty, Derrida and Faucoult,²⁴ that the existential consciousness can have no ‘contents’²⁵ and can have no independent existence, no existence apart from Being. It would further follow that there can be no intelligible thesis of idealism, which relies on its dependency. With this analysis, the traditional notion of subject (in Cartesian-Husserlian sense) is altered radically. There is no subject or self 'in' or 'behind' consciousness; the self, as already hinted, is simply the unitary consciousness itself: Self is not relative to experience as we may see in subjectivistic approaches; rather it is this experience. Consciousness, being an existential experience, is no longer the subject in Kant's meaning of the term, it is subjectivity itself or in Sartre's words, the immanence of self in self.

There is further room here to compare Sadra with Sartre. As often mentioned, the unitary consciousness should be regarded as an existential experience. We would underline the word 'experience' here. The word 'experience' here indicates, for Sadra, a creative relation to Being which puts the self in absorption. Therefore, it does not mean, in superficial positivistic sense, the scientific experience. Rather, it is a purely existential experience for Sadra. Such an experience, according to Sadra, is the hermeneutic content of mysticism ('irfan). However, since it is the being of the self, we, even being non-mystics, also live with a special degree of such an experience. It is the root of all aspects of our acts. Now if we take the word 'perception' in its existential sense as seemingly used so by Sartre and the existential phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty who maintain that it is the content of phenomenology, we may, then, find more similarity here. In a similar manner, Sadraean 'experience' and Sartrean 'perception' perception need not be analysed as a primarily cognitive notion (as we find in Husserl). Such an existential experience and perception may be viewed more broadly as the general relations of consciousness and Being or as the original relation of consciousness to being. Accordingly both Sartre and Sadra take such an existential perception and experience as the nature of consciousness. For both Sadra and Sartre such an experience and perception to be analysed as 'primitive'. In this case, both also begin with the doctrine that the existence of consciousness itself is known simply by virtue of its existence. What Sartre and Sadra concur over this latter doctrine is that self-knowledge (in its subjectivistic sense) is not the defining characteristic of the existential consciousness, for it ignores the 'non-reflective consciousness' or 'preconscious intentionality'. It may be said from this perspective that Cartesian cogito is true and necessary only on a reflective, articulate 'level' of that existential experience or perception. The definition of "consciousness" thus focuses on this-- that is, its always being existentially an experience inside Being. According to these authors, consciousness, it seems, is this existentially factual experience; it is not an object itself or an object for itself. Sadra determined this by insisting that the truth of this experience can never be accessible for the reflective thought; then it is, to use a mystical term, 'empty' for the reflective thought. Sartre also points out that this consciousness is 'nothing'.

The Sadraean thesis provides him with another idiom which we can call "preontological touch", and by which he was able to say that the illuminative self in his process of experiencing Being is at home with the reality of beings and can then catch their existential truths. One can say, on this perspective, that Sadra may have maintained that the existential experience of the unitary consciousness has a twofold task: to be the experience of its very being as well as of the beings at the same time. Though the unitary consciousness is by its illuminative nature as a self is, in Sadra's term, being-for-the other (i.e., Being which is in-itself), that is, it has no independent being apart from its special, hanging being, however, the unitary consciousness is "being-for-itself" (al wujood li nafseh)²⁶ in the sense that it is present-before-Being and experiences both its being and the other being with which it is in a preontological touch. If so, we may see a similarity in Sartre: Though the twofold task of Sadraean unitary consciousness may seem different in nature from Sartrean task of consciousness, some similarities may, however, come in force here. Sartre arrives at a distinction between two very different kinds of Being: the being of objects for consciousness (beings-in-themselves) and the being of consciousness (being-for-itself). Consciousness is dependent, for Sartre, on its objects just as for Sadra on Being for its own existence. To avoid any postulation of consciousness as an object of some sort distinct from its objects, Sartre introduces a convention of parenthesising the (of) in the expression "consciousness (of)". This locution is similar to Sadra's characterization of "being present before Being" (or in Heideggerian term "being-in-the-world") In both cases, the point of the linguistic innovation is to prevent us from separating different components of the expression, specifically, from attempting to logically distinguish consciousness (or the illuminative self) from its objects (Being). "Consciousness (of) objects" is thus to be taken as a primitive for Sartre just as presence before Being, the unitary consciousness is a primitive for Sadra. Both expressions carry enormous philosophical thrust, for they are basic rejections of Husserl's basic distinctions between cogito and cogitation, noetic act and noema, subject and object. On the basis of this characterization of consciousness as an existential experience or perception, in a more or less similar way, these authors recharacterise the sense in which this existential consciousness which is being-for-itself, is self-knowing (in Sadra's words ma'refat al-nafs). The existential consciousness is essentially aware of itself as well as the other beings with which it is, holds Sadra, in an preontological touch. ²⁷According to both Sadra and Sartre, this is even a necessary 'ontological' (preontological) feature of consciousness. It is not, then, to be confused with the reflectivity of the Cartesian cogito. There is no self (in subjectivistic sense) in this existential consciousness, and all of this is still non-reflective. The cogito is based on reflective thought-experiment. Consciousness can then be characterized as "being-for-itself" (in Sadra: al wujood li nafseh) because its existence consists in its dependency on objects (Being for Sadra), its non-reflective knowledge of its own dependency on objects, and the possibility of explicit recognition of itself in the Cartesian cogito.

Much of the characterization of being-for-itself (al wujood li nafseh), however, must be made in contrast to Being-in-itself (al wujood fi dhateh). The key to the distinction between the two kinds of being is, says Sadra in a Sartrean tone, the centrally important recognition that Being-for-itself can never be dependent on any thing except itself; that is to say, its being comes from within itself not from without; in Heideggerian words it is groundless; rather it is the ground of the beings. Whereas the being-for the other, the illuminative self as the unitary consciousness, is absolutely dependent on Being (the objects for Sartre).

Though the above comparison shows the similarities between Sartre and Sadra, it must not however be taken that the aim or nature of their discussion are simply one and the same. While Sadra intends to catch a theory to cover all implicit, tacit knowledge (ma'refah) from a commonsensical everydayness to the higher mystical apprehension, from the naive sensual intuition to a huge invisible kernel, Sartre avoids any involvement in invisible field and mystical apprehension. Moreover, while Sadra following the illuminative mystics in suggesting the unitary consciousness as an existentially current experience, avoids any subjectivistic idiom in this particular case (when for example he speaks of the experience of non-self (fana al dhat) considering it as "emptiness"('adam), Sartre who strains to follow Husserl in his analysis of consciousness, constantly falls back into traditional subject-object language; this may easily be seen in his division of consciousness in two kinds one of which is the object for the other. Although he intends to support Heidegger in his rejection of Cartesianism, the dualism between consciousness and one's own body is never rejected, even though he insists that one's body is not simply "another object." In spite of his rejection of Husserl's transcendental ego and his epoch, Sartre does not seem to succeed in ridding himself of those Cartesian elements which he most needs to reject according to his own methodology.

Trying to present the self as an unitary consciousness whose nature is an illuminative being, the Sadraean thesis seems to helpfully aid us to answer some major problems risen from modern Western thought. Let us refer to two original problems here: the being of the subject and the subject-object relationship. Concerning the first problem, the being of the subject considered by this philosophy as an illuminative entity who is absorbed and situated in the Being. In this stage, correctly speaking, there is no subject, no mind (in the Cartesian-Husserlian sense); the subject is only a self as unitary consciousness. On this basis, the second problem is regarded. To be sure, we all commonsensely feel that the self is somehow a source of thought, intentions and will, and an "end" which, by its nature, defines and embodies important values and goals. Identifying the self and the unitary consciousness, this theory tried to show how the unitary consciousness, devoid of structure, activity, and intentions, could be related to the reflective knowledge whose structure is intentional and correspondence of object-subject.

Understood as unitary consciousness, the self has a twofold act: on one hand, since it is an illuminative entity and situated in the context of Being, it has a pre-ontological touch with the beings-- i.e., the objects-in-themselves for the reflective thought; their beings are immediately present for the self. Then, as concluded, the self has access to the reality of the beings through the eidetic touch.²⁸ On the other hand, the self creates and grounds the reflective thought by an illuminative relation. It means for this philosophy that the self as unitary consciousness ascertains the correspondence of the mental objects-- i.e., the concepts or representations which are presented in the mind --with their external objects-- i.e., the external example and instance of those concepts and representations.

So understood, this theory also eliminates the triple consequence of the modern subjectivism as well: scepticism, idealism and solipsism. Scepticism arises from the gap between the mental concept or representation and its external object to which, it is supposed by subjectivism, the subject has no access. Then, the problem here is who we can be sure of our knowledge from the external world. The same gap renders idealism; since if the subject has no access to the external world, then all the subject concerns with is nothing but concepts and representations. We presupposed an external world only as a supposed reference point for our concepts and representations. Now, this idealism ends up with solipsism: the subject is that on which the world as a whole dependent; every subject ultimately is a monad.²⁹

The Sadraean theory seems to avoid these implications. Since the self apprehends the reality of the beings-in themselves through the eidetic touch, then, there is no room for the scepticism; it is because what (i.e., the object-in-itself) is supposed to be absent in our reflective thought is present for the self by its being: I am already pre-ontologically in touch with the pen by which I am writing, not in an intentionally consciously manner of representative, reflective knowledge-- rather, through hybridation of my being and the being of pen; in the sense that its being is present for my unitary consciousness, i.e., my being. The reality of pen is not totally absent for me to raise scepticism; the pen is present by its being for my being. Then I catch its reality as it is in itself. It is the transcendental self/ego, not the unitary consciousness that is in hallucinative dream of 'thing-in-itself'. This refutation of scepticism in this way is supported by another Sadraean thesis explaining that the unitary consciousness is free from being false; in other words, there is no error in the unitary consciousness because it is pure being. Then, when the unitary consciousness picks up the reality of a being like pen, it does not make an error. The error may however take place in the level of reflection while conceptualising that reality.

In addition, this theory puts us in a way to avoid idealism. This is because firstly the unitary consciousness is, according to this philosophy, a lived experience manifested as self in everyday exercising to be; in other words, it is a living experience of Being in/by/with Being. Secondly, the gap by which idealism arises is filled up by the Sadraean theses of the pre-ontological touch and the illuminative relation. Since we can pick up the reality of beings, the things-in- themselves, through the unitary consciousness by means of the pre-ontological touch and the illuminative realization, idealism whose trap is hidden in dismissing the external reality of things-in-themselves, automatically removed. I am not living only with my representations, rather, already with their actual facts.

Again this theory enforces us to escape from solipsism. Solipsism arises if we confine ourselves to the subject as possessor of only representations and concepts and isolate knowledge from being-- namely; disregard the real nature of 'being' of the subject. Contrary to this, Sadraean theory emphasizes two points here: first, it starts from Being not knowledge, reducing the subject to his source, then, interpreting knowledge as a kind of being. Secondly, it considers the subject as an illuminative entity whose nature is a pre-ontological unitary consciousness and then he is in touch with other entities. Therefore, I apprehend the reality of the beings in the world-- including other selves-- in their beings. Since there is no room for error in this touch, I reach the reality of each entity with which I am in touch. Since the pre-ontological structure of human beings (not of course their capacities and potentialities) is one and the same, the nature of this touch is also one and the same for every self; then, every self reaches the same reality as the other selves do. Hence, it can be concluded from the Sadraean thesis that there is no solipsism. What comes first is being and the self is a fellow of it. My pre-ontological path to catch reality is like others'. We, the selves, are on common site to reach the reality. What makes us, the selves, different in our reflective interpretation of that reality is our differences in the degrees of strong ness or weakness of our faculties by which we translate that reality in the language of the reflective thought?

Notes: