there was a time (12th century——my favorite) when Avicenna was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable from its spiritual context. ——> think of the alchemists for whom the operation undertaken in the laboratory only attained its end if it was accompanied by an interior transmutation of the man——that is to say only if it effected the interior birth (of spiritual man)
(for Corbin) Modern / Western venture = application of the intelligence to the scientific investigation of a nature that has been desacralized, which must be violated in order to find out its laws (and to subject its forces to the human will)
Alcemist’s chemistry
Nicolas Oresme’s geometry
[out of history]
Descartes’ geometry is also out of history, discontinious
Mullah Sadra is the philosopher of metamorphoses and palingeneses (estehaleh-ha & rastakhiz-ha [استحاله ها و رستاخیزها])
*phenomenology of the act of existing*
it is so dangerous to say any thinker, writer, artist, or philosopher ‘was of his/her own time.’ nobody has ever been in their own time, never. we are constantly out of time.
things occur in Malakut (ملکوت), not in the time of this world.
it is a matter of interior history" class="highlight">history, exoteric in the etymological sense of the word, subtle history" class="highlight">history whose events do not take place in the exterior world of objects, but in the subtle world of lived states, events in the Malakut, in the world of the ‘Soul,’ in the ‘Heaven’ or the ‘Hell’ which man carries within himself.
(and this is precisely what is “changing someone’s story” is about. “let me change the rhythm of your story ——> let me change your history" class="highlight">history.” ~= storytelling)
this history" class="highlight">history——interior wild facts——intermingles with his wills, and objectives itself in the web of exterior facts. these are events of 'ajayebnameh, Shahnameh, Qur'an, Grail Cycle and so on, the events of this history" class="highlight">history (inspire parables? and) make up sacred history" class="highlight">history (tarikh-e ghodsi [تاریخ قدسی]) =/= empirical historicity
*the question always remains:
-what *is of this world?
-what is the organ of perception?
-does oneself need to ‘belong’ to this sacred history" class="highlight">history in order to come to pass (in the Malakut)? (being born in it, etc.)