Does the State Really Exist? A Perspective from the Transcendent Philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā

Year 2015, Volume: 14 Issue: 1, 76 - 90, 26.12.2015

Cecep Zakarias El Bilad

Abstract

This research comes from a simple question whether
the state exists in the real world or is only a fiction in the mind. In
International Relations (IR), the state is often conceptualized as if she is an
individual that has certain qualities of personality. The concept, however, is
actually considered as a metaphor only or an as if person. What really exist in
the extra-mental world are those individuals “in” it. If that is the case, then
why the effects of its existence are so real and can be felt by everyone? And,
how can IR be scientific while its object of study is a fiction? The neglect of
the state’s existence is rooted in the empirical epistemology held by most IR thinkers and
students especially since the wave of scientification of the discipline began
in the 60’s. They hold the empirical view that knowledge stems primaliry from
the sensory experience, and anything beyond it has no certainty. The similar
neglect is, in fact, shared also among non-empirical IR thinkers coming about
in the later decades such as postmodernists and constructivists, because of
their idealist ontology that there is no any objective reality but constructed
discoursively. This research wants to analyze the ontological status of the
state from the perspective of Mullā Ṣadrā’s transcendent philosophy. His
philosophical system that primarily concerns on the existence qua existence and
the existential structure of realities, serves as the foundation of any
discussion about the existence of entities, without exeption that of the state

Keywords

Existence, Reality, State, Soul, Individual, Society, Mind

References

• Thomas S. Kuhn, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Second Edition, Enlarged) (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1970), 10-11.
• H.F. Holsti, “States and Statehood”, in Richard Little and Michael Smith (ed), Perspectives on World Politics (Third Edition) (New York: Routledge, 2006), 19.
• Holsti, States and Statehood, 18-19.
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• Based on the Hobbesian doctrine, neorealists believe that anarchy is the basic character of the international system. International relationship is built upon the mutual motivation to defend, compete and dominate each other. At the international level, between states, there is no Leviathan to control and organize the anarchy. Robert M. A Crawford, Idealism and Realism in International Relations: Beyond the Disciplilne (New York: Routledge, 2000), 32 & 36.
• Robert Gilpin, “The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism,” International Organization (Massachusetts: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the World Peace Foundation, Vol. 38 No. 2, Spring, 1984): 301.
• Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus The State (Idaho: the Caxton Printers, Ltd, 1960), 141.
• Spencer, The Man Versus The State, 65.
• Anjan Chakravartty, A Metaphysic for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8.
• Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 216.