On the Loss of Ali Larijani's Kantian-Sadrian Synthesis

This essay examines the philosophical significance of Ali Larijani's work on Immanuel Kant through the interpretive lens of Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Philosophy. While the political circumstances of Larijani's death on March 17, 2026, demand their own reckoning, this analysis brackets geopolitics to ask a purely philosophical question: What does it mean to read Kant through Mulla Sadra, and why might such a reading constitute a genuine philosophical contribution rather than mere syncretism? I argue that Larijani's approach, as reconstructed from his three Farsi-language texts, offers a distinctive intervention into Kantian scholarship by locating the source of synthetic a priori judgments in what Sadra calls the "gradation of existence" (tashkīk al-wujūd). This reading challenges both standard Western interpretations of Kant's transcendental idealism and traditional Islamic critiques of Kant's finitism. The loss of Larijani is therefore not merely political but epistemic: a particular philosophical voice, capable of mediating between two seemingly incommensurable traditions, has been silenced.

1. Introduction: The Philosopher as Political Target

On March 17, 2026, Ali Larijani was killed in Tehran. The circumstances of his assassination—attributed to Israeli intelligence services—have been extensively documented elsewhere. What has received less attention is the philosophical corpus Larijani left behind. Before his political career as Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Majlis Speaker, and finally as a senior figure in Iranian politics, Larijani was an academic philosopher of considerable sophistication. His three volumes on Kant, written in Farsi for an Iranian philosophical audience, represent the most sustained attempt to integrate Kant's critical philosophy with the core commitments of Mulla Sadra's Hikmat al-Muta'aliyah.

The conjunction is surprising. Kant, the philosopher of finite human reason and the limits of possible experience, would seem an unlikely conversation partner for Sadra, the philosopher of the transcendence of existence and the soul's journey toward intellectual union with the divine. Kant warns against any claim to intellectual intuition; Sadra's entire project culminates in the possibility of just such intuition. Kant insists on the irreducibility of the sensible manifold; Sadra subordinates sensible particularity to the gradations of intelligible existence. To read one through the other, as Larijani did, is either philosophical confusion or philosophical innovation. This essay defends the latter judgment.

2. Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Philosophy: A Minimal Exposition

To appreciate Larijani's project, we must first understand the philosophical architecture he brought to his reading of Kant. Mulla Sadra (c. 1571–1636) is the culminating figure of the Isfahan school of Islamic philosophy, and his magnum opus, The Four Journeys (al-Asfār al-arba'ah), systematically synthesizes the rationalism of Avicenna, the illuminationism (ishrāq) of Suhrawardi, and the mystical theology of Ibn 'Arabi. Three doctrines are essential for understanding Larijani's Kant interpretation.

2.1 The Principality of Existence (Aṣālat al-Wujūd)

The first is the doctrine of the principality of existence over quiddity (aṣālat al-wujūd). For Avicenna, individual things are composites of existence (wujūd) and quiddity (māhiyyah)—what a thing is versus that it is. Most post-Avicennan philosophers debated which of these has metaphysical priority. Sadra's decisive move was to argue that existence alone is real; quiddity is merely a conceptual limit or boundary within existence itself. Existence is not a predicate added to quiddities but the sole metaphysical reality, which differentiates itself into degrees and modes. Quiddities are abstractions from these differentiations.

This doctrine inverts the relationship between essence and existence found in much of the Aristotelian tradition. For Kant, as we shall see, the distinction between existence and essence is preserved but subjected to transcendental conditions. Reading Kant through aṣālat al-wujūd means asking whether Kant's transcendental idealism can be reinterpreted as a theory of the self-differentiation of existence rather than a theory of the constitution of objects by subjective categories.

2.2 The Gradation of Existence (Tashkīk al-Wujūd)

The second doctrine follows from the first. If existence alone is real, it cannot be a univocal predicate applied identically to all beings. Nor can it be purely equivocal, with no common meaning across different beings. Instead, existence is analogical or gradational (tashkīkī): a single reality that admits of more and less, intensity and weakness, perfection and deficiency. The existence of a stone, a plant, an animal, a human, and the divine Intellect are not different kinds of existence but different degrees of the same reality. Each degree contains the lower degrees within it (while adding new perfections) and participates in the higher degrees (while falling short of them).

This gradational ontology has profound implications for epistemology. If existence is gradational, then knowledge is not merely the representation of objects by subjects but a mode of participation in existence itself. Higher degrees of existence come with higher degrees of epistemic capacity. The human intellect is not a blank slate but an existent whose degree of being determines its capacity to apprehend other degrees of being. This is radically different from Kant's Copernican Revolution, which places the conditions of knowledge entirely within the subject's cognitive apparatus.

2.3 Substantial Motion (al-Ḥarakah al-Jawhariyyah)

The third doctrine is substantial motion. Aristotelian physics recognized only accidental change—a substance remains identical while its qualities alter. Sadra argues that change occurs at the level of substance itself. Every entity is perpetually undergoing substantial transformation, moving through degrees of existence. An organism is not a fixed substance with changing accidents but a process of becoming, an existence that is always intensifying or diminishing in its ontological grade.

Substantial motion entails that time is not a container in which substances persist unchanged but the very form of substantial becoming. This anticipates certain themes in post-Kantian German Idealism—particularly Hegel's claim that substance is subject—while remaining distinct from Kant's treatment of time as the a priori form of inner sense. The question Larijani asks is whether substantial motion can be read as a metaphysical interpretation of what Kant identifies as the synthetic unity of apperception.

3. Kant's Critical Architecture: The Standard Interpretation

Before examining Larijani's synthesis, we must recall the central elements of Kant's philosophy that he engages. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) attempts to answer how synthetic a priori judgments are possible—judgments that extend our knowledge (synthetic) while being necessarily and universally true (a priori). Kant's solution is transcendental idealism: space and time are pure forms of intuition, and the categories (substance, causality, unity, etc.) are concepts that the understanding applies to the sensible manifold. Objects of experience are appearances (phenomena), not things in themselves (noumena).

Three features of Kant's system are particularly relevant for Larijani's critique.

3.1 The Finitude of Human Intuition

For Kant, human intuition is always sensible, never intellectual. We receive intuitions passively through affection by objects; we do not produce objects through our thinking. An intuitive intellect (intellectus archetypus) would create its objects in the act of knowing them, but such an intellect is not ours and cannot be postulated as actual. This finitude is the cornerstone of Kant's anti-rationalism. It rules out any claim to intellectual intuition or direct intellectual vision of essences. All knowledge requires the cooperation of sensible intuition and conceptual understanding.

3.2 The Discursivity of the Understanding

Kant's understanding is discursive, not intuitive. It operates by applying concepts to intuitions. Concepts are rules for synthesizing the manifold of intuition, not direct apprehensions of reality. This discursivity entails that human knowledge is always mediated, always requiring the work of judgment to subsume particulars under universals. There is no intellectual perception of the particular as such; the particular is given only in sensibility.

3.3 The Thing in Itself

Kant's distinction between appearance and thing in itself follows from the finitude of intuition. Since we can only know objects as they appear under the conditions of space, time, and the categories, we cannot know objects as they exist independently of these conditions. The thing in itself is not another object but a limiting concept—the thought of an object considered apart from the conditions of our sensibility. Kant is notoriously ambiguous about whether things in themselves exist, are merely problematic, or are postulates of practical reason. But he is clear that theoretical reason cannot cognize them.

4. Larijani's Sadrian Reading of Kant: A Reconstruction

Larijani's three books—The Mathematical Method in Kant's Philosophy, Metaphysics and the Exact Sciences, and Intuition and the Synthetic A Priori Judgments—approach Kant from different angles but converge on a single interpretive thesis. I reconstruct this thesis in four propositions.

4.1 The Synthetic A Priori as Manifestation of Gradational Existence

Larijani's central claim is that synthetic a priori judgments are not merely subjective conditions for the possibility of experience. They are, rather, the epistemic correlate of the gradational structure of existence itself. A synthetic a priori judgment—such as "every event has a cause"—is synthetic because it unites distinct concepts, a priori because its necessity is not derived from empirical generalization. For Kant, this necessity is grounded in the nature of the understanding. For Larijani, reading Kant through Sadra, this necessity is grounded in the necessary structure of existence as gradational.

Consider the principle of causality. For Sadra, the causal relation is not an arbitrary connection between distinct substances but a manifestation of ontological dependence. The effect is a lower degree of existence than the cause; causality is the gradient along which existence flows from more perfect to less perfect degrees. The necessity of causality, on this reading, is the necessity of existence's self-differentiation. Larijani argues that Kant's transcendental deduction inadvertently captures this Sadrian insight but misinterprets it as a feature of the subject rather than a feature of existence itself.

4.2 Intuition as Intellectual-Sensible Hybrid

Kant insists that human intuition is purely sensible. Larijani argues that this dichotomy between sensible and intellectual intuition is a false one, at least from a Sadrian perspective. For Sadra, the senses are not a separate faculty from the intellect but lower grades of the same cognitive capacity. Sensation is intellect at its least intensified degree; intellection is sensation at its most intensified degree. The difference is one of degree, not kind.

Larijani therefore proposes that Kant's "sensible intuition" should be understood as the minimal degree of intellectual intuition—intellection so weak that it appears receptive. The manifold of intuition is not raw sensory data but existence apprehended at its lowest grade of intensity. The famous "mystery" of how categories apply to intuitions (the "schematism") is dissolved once we recognize that intuitions are already, in their very receptivity, minimally intellectual. The schematism is not a third thing mediating between heterogeneous domains but the recognition that the two domains are actually one domain at different gradations.

This is a radical departure from Kant, and Larijani acknowledges that Kant himself would reject it. But Larijani is not offering historical exegesis; he is offering philosophical reconstruction. He claims that Kant's system works better, resolves its own tensions, if we adopt this Sadrian modification.

4.3 The Thing in Itself as Higher Gradation

Perhaps Larijani's most provocative claim concerns the thing in itself. For Kant, the thing in itself is the object considered apart from the conditions of our intuition—which means it is unknowable. Larijani argues that this negative conclusion follows only from Kant's assumption that intuition is exclusively sensible. If intuition is gradational, then the thing in itself is not an unknowable noumenon but existence at a higher grade than the grade accessible to our current cognitive state.

On this reading, the distinction between appearance and thing in itself is not a distinction between two kinds of objects but between two degrees of access to the same object. The same tree that appears to us under the conditions of space, time, and the categories is, in itself, the tree as it exists at a higher grade of existence. We do not encounter a different object when we think the thing in itself; we think the same object in a mode of existence that exceeds our current epistemic capacity.

This transforms the Kantian limitation from a permanent feature of finite cognition to a provisional feature of our current ontological grade. Larijani thus reads Kant as anticipating, albeit unconsciously, the Sadrian doctrine that knowledge is a function of existential intensification. To know more is to exist more fully; to exist more fully is to know more. The thing in itself is not forever hidden but accessible through spiritual-intellectual transformation—a conclusion Kant would have rejected as mystical enthusiasm (Schwärmerei).

4.4 Substantial Motion as Temporal Synthesis

Finally, Larijani reads Kant's transcendental unity of apperception—the "I think" that must be able to accompany all my representations—through the lens of Sadrian substantial motion. For Kant, the unity of apperception is the formal condition of any unified experience. The subject's self-consciousness is not a substantial self (Kant criticizes the parallelism of the soul) but the logical unity of the act of synthesizing representations.

Larijani argues that substantial motion provides what Kant's mere logical unity lacks: ontological grounding. The "I think" is not merely a formal condition but the subjective manifestation of an existence undergoing substantial motion. The synthesis of representations across time is not an act performed by a timeless subject but the self-awareness of existence as it intensifies or diminishes through its degrees. Time, for Kant the form of inner sense, becomes for Larijani the form of substantial motion—the mode in which existence experiences its own gradational becoming.

This reading converts Kant's transcendental subject into something closer to Hegel's Geist or Whitehead's actual entity. The subject is not a fixed structure but a process of becoming, and the categories are not a static inventory but the grammar of this process.

5. Critical Assessment: What Larijani Gains and Loses

Any philosophical synthesis risks losing the distinctive insights of each tradition while gaining only the appearance of systematic unity. We must ask: Does Larijani's Sadrian reading of Kant illuminate Kant, or does it simply project Sadrian doctrines onto a Kantian vocabulary?

5.1 Gains: Resolving Kantian Tensions

Larijani's reading arguably resolves several notorious tensions in Kant's critical philosophy. First, it explains how the categories can apply to intuitions without an unintelligible "third thing." If intuitions are already minimally intellectual (as lower degrees of existence), the schematism is merely the recognition of continuous gradation rather than a magical leap between heterogeneous domains.

Second, it makes sense of Kant's obscure claim that the transcendental object (the "something = x" that underlies appearances) is the correlate of the unity of apperception. For Larijani, the transcendental object is existence at its current grade, and the unity of apperception is the self-awareness of that grade.

Third, it offers a more satisfying account of why synthetic a priori judgments are necessarily true. For Kant, their necessity is merely "subjective" (grounded in the structure of our understanding) but has "objective validity" for appearances. This leaves open the skeptical possibility that other beings might have different categories and therefore different necessary truths. For Larijani, the necessity of causality, substance, and unity follows from the nature of existence itself. Any being that exists at any grade will find its existence structured gradationally, and therefore the synthetic a priori judgments will hold necessarily for any possible experience. The necessity is transcendental in Kant's sense but also ontological in Sadra's sense.

5.2 Losses: What Disappears from Kant

The losses are equally significant. First, Larijani's reading eliminates Kant's critical modesty. Kant's entire critical project is motivated by the desire to avoid dogmatic metaphysics while preserving scientific knowledge. The thing in itself is unknowable precisely to make room for faith, freedom, and morality. Larijani's claim that the thing in itself is knowable through spiritual transformation re-introduces the very dogmatic metaphysics Kant sought to overcome.

Second, Larijani's reading cannot accommodate Kant's separation of theoretical and practical reason. For Kant, theoretical reason gives us knowledge of appearances; practical reason gives us access to the noumenal realm through the moral law. The two are unified in a single rational faculty but cannot be reduced to each other. Larijani's ontological reading collapses the distinction: both theoretical and practical cognition become matters of existential gradation. The moral law, on this reading, would become a function of ontological intensification rather than an unconditional categorical imperative.

Third, and most seriously, Larijani's reading loses Kant's anti-eudaimonism. Kant famously argues that virtue does not consist in happiness, even blessedness, because this would make morality a matter of self-interest. Larijani's picture of spiritual-intellectual transformation as the path to higher grades of existence strongly suggests that the highest good is the perfection of one's own existence. This is closer to Aristotle or Spinoza than to Kant. Whether this is a loss depends on one's philosophical commitments, but it is certainly a departure from the letter of Kant's philosophy.

6. The Uniqueness of Larijani's Contribution

Why does this synthesis matter? What philosophical work does it do that neither Kant alone nor Sadra alone could do?

First, Larijani's reading provides a third option in contemporary Kant scholarship. The dominant interpretations of Kant are the "two-worlds" interpretation (appearances and things in themselves are distinct sets of objects) and the "two-aspects" interpretation (appearance and thing in itself are two ways of considering the same object). Larijani offers a "two-degrees" interpretation: appearance and thing in itself are the same object considered at two degrees of existential intensity. This is distinct from both standard interpretations and arguably better supported by certain texts (particularly Kant's discussion of the "intellectual intuition" we lack).

Second, Larijani's synthesis makes Kant available to Islamic philosophy in a new way. Traditional Islamic critiques of Kant (from Muḥammad Iqbāl to ʿAbd al-Karīm Surūsh) have tended to reject Kant's finitism outright, insisting on the possibility of intellectual intuition and direct knowledge of essences. Larijani offers a more sophisticated response: not rejection but absorption. He claims that Kant's system actually presupposes the gradational ontology of existence that Sadra articulates. Kant just did not know that he was a Sadrian.

Third, Larijani's work opens a path for contemporary analytic philosophy to engage with the Sadrian tradition. Analytic Kant scholarship has largely ignored Islamic philosophy. Larijani's careful, systematic, argumentative style—influenced by both the Farsi philosophical tradition and analytic philosophy's emphasis on clarity—provides a model for how these conversations might proceed. His work suggests that the categories of gradation, substantial motion, and the principality of existence are not merely historical curiosities but live options for addressing current debates in metaphysics and epistemology.

7. Conclusion: The Epistemic Loss

We return to where we began. The assassination of Ali Larijani was an act of political violence, and those who ordered and executed it bear full responsibility. But the loss is not merely political. A distinctive philosophical voice has been silenced—a voice that was engaged in one of the most ambitious projects in contemporary philosophy: the synthesis of Kant's critical philosophy with Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Philosophy.

This synthesis was incomplete. Larijani's three books lay out the program more than they complete it. Many questions remain unanswered. How exactly does the schematism become intelligible on the gradation model? Can the categorical imperative be reformulated in terms of existential intensification without losing its normative force? Does Larijani's reading collapse into a form of Spinozism that Kant explicitly rejected? These questions now lack their most promising interlocutor.

Philosophy proceeds through dialogue and debate. Each major philosopher stands on the shoulders of predecessors and in conversation with contemporaries. The Islamic philosophical tradition, from al-Kindī to Suhrawardī to Sadra to Ṭabāṭabāʾī, has always proceeded through commentary, critique, and synthesis. Larijani was continuing this tradition in a new key, bringing it into conversation with the most demanding and influential philosopher of the European Enlightenment. That conversation has been interrupted. The loss is epistemic as well as personal. We cannot measure what Larijani would have written, what arguments he would have refined, what objections he would have answered. We can only note that a certain philosophical possibility—the possibility of a serious, systematic, sophisticated Sadrian reading of Kant—has lost its most articulate defender.

The proper response is not political rhetoric but philosophical labor. Those who remain must take up Larijani's project, test his claims, extend his arguments, and correct his errors. The best memorial to a philosopher is to continue the conversation they began. Larijani's three books on Kant now await their readers and critics. Let them be read—not as political documents, not as curiosities of a scholar who happened also to be a politician, but as philosophy: demanding, systematic, and worth taking seriously. That is the least we owe to the dead, and the most we can do for the living.