Henry Corbin
Henry Corbin (1903–1978) is one of the most important and least-known philosophers of the twentieth century. A French scholar of Islamic mysticism, a student of Heidegger who became one of the first translators of Heidegger into French, and ultimately a philosopher who turned the Western philosophical tradition toward an encounter with the imaginal world it had forgotten — Corbin’s work is at once rigorously scholarly and genuinely visionary. His central concept, the mundus imaginalis, is foundational for the Relational Frontier’s understanding of why the men Jake works with feel disconnected from what they know intellectually, and what might constitute a genuine path through.
Core Ideas
Corbin’s intellectual biography has the shape of a genuine calling. He was trained in philosophy at the Sorbonne, deeply engaged with Heidegger (he translated Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?” into French in 1931, one of the earliest non-German engagements with Heidegger), and seemed set for a career in mainstream European philosophy. Then, in the early 1930s, his friend Louis Massignon handed him a manuscript: the work of Suhrawardi, the twelfth-century Persian philosopher who revived and transformed the ancient Zoroastrian concept of the luminous world of archetypes — what Suhrawardi called the Nā-kojā-Abād, the “land of nowhere” or “land beyond.” Corbin recognized immediately that Suhrawardi was pointing at something the Western philosophical tradition had systematically suppressed: a genuine ontological realm, neither purely intellectual nor purely material, accessible only through the faculty of active imagination.
This recognition became the organizing principle of Corbin’s life work. He spent decades studying the great figures of the Islamic mystical tradition — Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi, Mulla Sadra, Avicenna — not primarily as historical objects of study but as intellectual companions who had preserved and developed a mode of perception that modernity had lost. The mundus imaginalis — the ‘ālam al-mithāl of the Islamic tradition — is, in Corbin’s account, not a metaphor for psychological states or a poetic description of the imagination. It is an ontological claim: there is a real realm of being, intermediate between the purely intellectual and the purely material, populated by archetypal presences that are more real than their material reflections. The faculty that perceives this realm is the active imagination — and active imagination is not fantasy but a genuine cognitive organ.
Corbin’s diagnosis of modernity flows directly from this claim. The West, he argues, lost the imaginal world not by disproving it but by losing the epistemological vocabulary that would have allowed it to be recognized as genuine. The collapse of the Aristotelian cosmos, the Enlightenment’s reduction of knowledge to what can be empirically verified or logically demonstrated, the corresponding reduction of the imagination to a faculty for producing subjective fictions — these moves did not refute the imaginal. They made it imperceptible. We have been living in a flattened world: two-dimensional where reality is three-dimensional, or more.
His encounter with Heidegger left a permanent mark. Heidegger’s question of Being — the question of what it means for beings to be at all — resonated with the Islamic tradition’s insistence that the divine reality is not a being among beings but the very act of existing, the perpetual event of creation. But where Heidegger’s analysis terminated in resoluteness-toward-death as the structure of authentic existence, Corbin’s Islamic interlocutors opened toward the visionary ascent — toward what the tradition called mi’raj, the mystical journey upward through the imaginal realms. Corbin always felt that Heidegger stopped short of what the Islamic tradition offered.
James Hillman — the Jungian psychologist and founder of archetypal psychology — was decisively influenced by Corbin, whom he met at the Eranos conferences in Ascona, Switzerland (where Corbin, Jung, Eliade, and others gathered annually for decades). Hillman took Corbin’s imaginal ontology and translated it into a psychological practice: the archetypal images encountered in dreams, in symptoms, in works of art, in fantasy are not merely psychological projections but genuine presences — residents of the imaginal world that make themselves known through the psyche. Tom Cheetham, a contemporary scholar, has written the most accessible introductions to Corbin’s thought and is the best guide for non-specialists.
Key Works
- Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī (1958, English trans. 1969) — Corbin’s central text. The prefatory essay “Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal” is the essential entry point.
- The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism (1971, English trans. 1978) — More accessible; focuses on the visionary tradition and the concept of the luminous body.
- Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (1977, English trans. 1977) — On the imaginal geography of the Persian tradition.
- Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings (2012) — Best contemporary introduction. Start here before tackling Corbin directly.
- Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel (2004) — Another accessible Cheetham introduction.
Connections
- The Imaginal — The concept for which Corbin is known; his life’s work is its recovery and defense.
- The Imaginal Tradition — The broader lineage of which Corbin’s scholarship is the most rigorous modern expression.
- Meaning Crisis — Corbin’s loss of the imaginal and Vervaeke’s meaning crisis are two names for the same condition.
- Existentialism — Corbin was a student of Heidegger and one of the first to engage with Heidegger’s work; the imaginal can be read as a response to Heidegger’s question of Being.
Quotes
“The imaginal world is not the imaginary world of fantasy. It is a world as ontologically real as the sensory world and the intelligible world, but intermediate between them.” — Henry Corbin
“The active imagination is not a faculty for producing fictions. It is an organ of perception for a real order of being.” — Henry Corbin, paraphrased
“To lose the imaginal world is not to become more rational. It is to become less real.” — Henry Corbin, paraphrased
“Between the world of pure intellect and the world of sense, there is a world — the world of the soul, the world of image, the world of vision.” — Henry Corbin