The Weight of the Invisible: Max Scheler and Mullā Ṣadrā on Non-Objectual Experience

Abstract

This article argues that suffering exemplifies a distinctive mode of objectless yet meaningful experience that challenges the assumption that intuition must be grounded in the presence of a determinate object. Drawing on phenomenological and metaphysical resources, it brings Max Scheler’s phenomenology of feeling into dialogue with Mullā Ṣadrā’s ontology of graded existence to reconceptualize the epistemic and ontological status of pain. Against views that treat non-objectual experiences as merely subjective or epistemically deficient, the paper contends that suffering discloses a structured form of meaning that operates before and beyond object-based cognition. Scheler’s account of emotional intentionality is shown to illuminate how suffering reveals value and orientation without presenting an identifiable object, disclosing instead an invisible dimension of life as inhibited, fractured, or diminished. This non-objectual disclosure, while irreducible to sensory intuition, nevertheless grounds judgment and meaningful comportment toward the world. Ṣadrā’s metaphysics of tashkīk al-wujūd deepens this account by situating suffering within an ontology in which experience corresponds to graded intensities of being. On this view, suffering indexes a real ontological deficiency or limitation—neither sheer non-being nor objectifiable presence—that is known indirectly through its experiential effects. By integrating Scheler’s phenomenology with Ṣadrā’s doctrine of the primacy and gradation of existence, the article shows that suffering functions as an experiential access point to the invisible, where epistemology and ontology converge. The limits of intuition thus appear not as boundaries of knowledge, but as sites where non-objectual disclosure enables meaningful judgment about being itself.

1. Introduction: A Different Meaning for Suffering?

For a long time, experiences that lack a determinate object have been dismissed as epistemically deficient or merely subjective. Against this assumption, phenomenological analyses have shown that such experiences are not devoid of content but are instead structured by a distinctive mode of intuition directed toward what is not present to the senses. Across various religious, philosophical, and phenomenological traditions, suffering has consistently served as a privileged site where experience confronts its own limits. Far from being a merely contingent or pathological disturbance of life, pain has been treated as a phenomenon that demands interpretation, orientation, and response. Suffering constitutes a paradigmatic case of this objectless yet meaningful experience. Pain and affliction are undeniably given, yet what they disclose cannot be fully reduced to an identifiable object in the world. Max Scheler’s phenomenology of feeling offers a rigorous account of this structure, arguing that emotions are intentional disclosures of value that precede conceptual judgment while exceeding object-based perception. In suffering, emotions do not present a thing, but rather disclose an invisible dimension of life that is inhibited or fractured. This disclosure, while non-objectual, nevertheless grounds orientation, thereby challenging the assumption that intuition must be tied to the presence of an object to be meaningful or cognitively operative. For Scheler, emotions are not mute states imposed upon a passive subject but intentional disclosures of value that reveal the world as meaningful before conceptual reflection (Scheler 1974, pp. 121–22).

When read alongside Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī’s, commonly known as Mullā Ṣadrā, metaphysical doctrine of the gradation of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd), suffering can be further understood as an experience in which the invisible is not merely intuited affectively but apprehended ontologically. An acute understanding of the being of non-objects can be significantly deepened by shifting the focus from what appears to consciousness to how being discloses itself through graded modes of existence. What Ṣadrā offers is not merely an epistemology of experience, but an ontology in which experience is inseparable from the intensity and mode of being of that who experiences. Significant to note is his principle of the primacy of existence (aṣālat al-wujūd), which implies that experience cannot be exhausted by the intuition of objects or quiddities (Agha 2021, p. 41). Objects are secondary determinations of being; they are conceptual delimitations imposed upon a more fundamental, dynamic reality of existence (Mullā Ṣadrā 1967, pp. 229–30).1 Experience corresponds to the level of being at which the soul currently exists. At lower, corporeal levels, intuition tends toward sensory objects; at higher, imaginal and intelligible levels, experience becomes increasingly intensive, unified, and non-objectifiable. Thus, the limits of intuition mark a transition from extensive, object-like givenness to intensive, participatory modes of presence.

This study begins by establishing, through the conjunction of Scheler’s phenomenology of value and Mullā Ṣadrā’s metaphysics of existence, that suffering constitutes a non-objectifiable yet meaningful mode of experience, challenging the primacy of object-directed intuition. It then develops Ṣadrā’s account of the soul’s transubstantial motion and the imaginal realm to provide an ontological framework in which such experiences can be understood as transformations in the intensity and mode of being rather than as deficient cognizations. The analysis subsequently examines suffering as a value-laden and sacrificial phenomenon structured across stratified levels of emotional life, culminating in the possibility of “blessed suffering” as an integration of pain within a deeper orientation toward the divine. Bringing these trajectories into systematic relation, suffering marks a limit of intuition not as an epistemic failure but as a site where phenomenological description and metaphysical participation converge.

For Ṣadrā, existence unfolds along a continuum of intensity, such that deficiency, limitation, and privation mark diminished modes of being rather than sheer non-being. Suffering becomes an experiential index of existential gradation. It discloses a real yet indiscernible ontological condition that cannot be directly objectified but can nonetheless be known through its effects within experience. In this sense, suffering functions analogously to unobservable entities in the sciences, where judgment is formed not through direct intuition of an object but through indirect disclosure and structured inference. Before moving any further, a brief note is in order. Mullā Ṣadrā, a 17th-century Shi’i mystic, theologian, and philosopher, is widely regarded as a central figure in later Islamic philosophy, synthesizing Ibn Sina’s metaphysics, Suhrawardi’s Illuminationism, and mystical thought into what he termed the “Transcendent Philosophy” (al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliyya). While Scheler occupies a foundational place in early phenomenology, particularly through his development of a phenomenology of value and affectivity, extending the scope of phenomenological inquiry into the ethical and experiential dimensions of human life. Bringing Scheler and Ṣadrā into dialogue, this paper argues that suffering exemplifies a mode of objectless experience that nonetheless makes possible meaningful judgment about the indeterminant, thereby illuminating the limits of intuition not as a boundary of knowledge, but as a site where phenomenology and metaphysics intersect (Kaln 2010, p. 198).

The complementarity between Scheler and Ṣadrā lies in the convergence of phenomenological description and metaphysical explanation. Scheler’s analysis of feeling shows how suffering functions as a value-disclosive experience that exceeds object-intentionality, structuring the subject’s relation to meaning at a pre-conceptual level. Yet his account remains primarily descriptive. Ṣadrā’s metaphysics extends this insight by explaining why such non-objective experiences are possible; as existence itself is graded and dynamic, experience corresponds to varying intensities of being rather than to fixed objects. What appears in Scheler as a limit of intuition emerges in Ṣadrā as an index of ontological transformation. Read together, their frameworks reveal suffering as both a phenomenological disclosure of value and an ontological participation in the unfolding of being, thereby bridging the gap between lived experience and metaphysical structure. The question arises as to the ontological conditions that make such disclosure possible; what must the structure of the subject be such that it can undergo experiences that exceed object-directed intuition while nonetheless remaining intelligible and significant? It is precisely here that Ṣadrā’s account of the soul becomes indispensable. By reconceiving the subject not as a static bearer of experiences but as a dynamically unfolding reality traversing degrees of being, his framework provides the ontological grounding for understanding how suffering can function as a transformative, rather than merely receptive, mode of experience.

2. Mullā Ṣadrā’s Affectivity of the Soul

In Ṣadrā’s metaphysics, the soul (al-nafs) is a single, unified reality that unfolds through a plurality of faculties and functions. The soul initially appears as body (jism) and, through the process of transubstantial motion (ḥarakah jawhariyyah), progressively actualizes itself as the vegetative soul (al-nafs al-nabātiyyah), the animal soul (al-nafs al-ḥayawāniyyah), and finally the human soul (al-nafs al-insāniyyah) (Mullā Ṣadrā 1967, pp. 229–30). These stages are not externally imposed additions but internal developments that emerge from within the substance of the original body. Ṣadrā illustrates this process through embryological development: human sperm is initially a mineral entity potentially possessing vegetal life; in the womb, it becomes actually vegetal and potentially animal; at birth, the infant is actually animal and potentially human (ibid.). As the individual matures, the human being becomes fully actualized while remaining capable of attaining angelic perfection or descending toward demonic existence (Moris 2003, pp. 120–32).

All stages of the soul’s development, according to Ṣadrā, are latent within the original substance and gradually actualized through transubstantial motion (ibid.).2 Through this process, the soul traverses successive degrees of being until it ultimately achieves independence from matter and potentiality, thereby attaining immortality (ibid., pp. 128–38). Although the human soul comes into existence concomitantly with the body, it possesses a mode of spiritual subsistence that enables it to transcend bodily dependence. At each stage of ascent, the soul acquires faculties proportionate to its ontological level (ibid.). As a mineral, it possesses the capacity to preserve form; as a plant, the faculties of growth, reproduction, and assimilation; as an animal, motion, desire, and the external senses; and as a higher animal, the internal faculties of memory and imagination. According to Ṣadrā, a human soul develops five inner faculties: common sense (ḥiss al-mushtarak), estimation (wahm), fantasy (khayāl), memory (dhākirah), and the faculties of imagination (mutakhayyilah) and thought (mutafakkirah) (Mullā Ṣadrā 1967, pp. 235–38). Throughout these transformations, it remains the same soul whose latent capacities become actualized rather than externally acquired (ibid.). The theory of transubstantial motion reconfigures experience as a process of becoming rather than a series of static acts of intuition (ibid.). Since the soul is continuously in motion across levels of being, experience is always transitional. Non-objective experiences—especially limit-experiences such as suffering, love, or revelation—signal moments in which the soul is being reconfigured at the level of its substance. These experiences cannot be fully intuited because they are not states the subject has but transformations the subject undergoes.

Since the human body synthesizes the mineral, vegetative, and animal realms, Ṣadrā regards it as the apex of material creation; yet the human soul occupies an even more extraordinary position within the total order of being. Although originating in material conditions marked by potentiality and limitation, the soul is capable of traversing all levels of cosmic existence without forfeiting its individuality (ibid.). Created alongside the body, the soul nonetheless possesses a transcendent orientation and immortal destiny. In al-Shawāhid al-rubūbiyyah, Ṣadrā emphasizes that despite its humble beginnings, the human soul is endowed with limitless potential. It is described as a divine mystery—a convergence of divinity and dust, a meeting point between creature and Creator, and a bridge between the finite and the infinite (ibid.). Death, in this framework, signifies the disintegration of the physical body but marks for the immaterial soul a passage into eternal life and liberation from material constraint. Against the peripatetic view, exemplified by Ibn Rushd, that only the intellect is immortal, Ṣadrā, in agreement with certain Sufi thinkers, maintains that the imaginative faculty (mutakhayyilah) also survives bodily death and becomes independent of the corporeal frame (Moris 2003, pp. 128–38). Following death, both intellect and imagination enjoy autonomous modes of existence (ibid.).

The foregoing account of the soul’s transubstantial development establishes that experience is inseparable from the ontological level at which the soul exists. Yet this raises a further question: how are such transformations registered within lived experience, particularly when they exceed the limits of sensory intuition? Ṣadrā’s doctrine of the imaginal realm provides the mediating framework allowing for a more precise articulation of how experiences of suffering, which resist direct objectification, are nonetheless concretely lived and temporally structured.

3. Between Earthly and Imaginal Conditions

To illustrate the soul’s earthly condition, Ṣadrā employs the analogy of the embryo in the womb. Just as the unborn child inhabits the world yet remains unaware of it due to the confines of the womb, so too does the human being exist already in the next world while remaining veiled by the limitations of worldly consciousness (Mullā Ṣadrā 1967, p. 193; Moris 2003, p. 128). Upon death, the soul departs this world carrying with it its imaginal or subtle body (jism mithālī), which is formed from the totality of one’s modes of being, thinking, and acting in earthly life. Its resurrection constitutes the lesser resurrection (qiyāmah ṣughrā), while the passage of the fully developed imaginal body into the spiritual world constitutes the greater resurrection (qiyāmah kubrā) (Mullā Ṣadrā 1967, p. 196). Accordingly, Ṣadrā interprets bodily resurrection (al-maʿād al-jismānī) not as the reanimation of gross physical matter, but as the resurrection of the acquired body (jism muktasab), namely the imaginal body. This body retains human form while consisting of a subtle, non-material substance. The principle of identity and individuality resides in the soul rather than the body. Ṣadrā reinforces this claim by noting that although the physical body undergoes continuous change throughout life, personal identity remains intact—demonstrating that individuality is grounded in the soul rather than in bodily continuity (Agha 2021, p. 43).

From this perspective, the temporality of suffering is reframed. As an imaginal experience, suffering is not governed by linear, clock time; it does not simply pass in the way sensible pain does.3 It dilates, contracts, or persists with a density that resists chronological measurement. This explains why suffering can feel interminable or timeless, even when its sensible causes are brief or absent. In Ṣadrā’s terms, this is because imaginal being is more unified and intense than corporeal being. Suffering becomes a mode of temporal saturation in which the subject is held rather than merely affected. The limit of intuition here is not a lack of data but an excess of lived duration that cannot be stabilized as an object in time (ibid.). By this register, suffering implicates the agency of the subject in a way that neither moral voluntarism nor passive receptivity can adequately describe. Since the imaginal level is one in which the soul’s dispositions, habits, and orientations actively shape what appears, suffering discloses something about how the subject has become what it is. This does not mean that suffering is chosen or deserved, but that it is existentially revelatory, and exposes deposited orientations of desire, fear, hope, and attachment that ordinarily remain tacit.

Death thus marks the soul’s transition from the sensible world to the imaginal world (ʿālam al-mithāl), which functions as an isthmus (barzakh) between the corporeal and spiritual realms. A barzakh mediates between two realities without being reducible to either. The imaginal world consists of “suspended forms” (al-muthul al-muʿallaqah), comparable to reflections in a mirror: simultaneously real and unreal, existent and non-existent. This ambiguity arises from its intermediary ontological status. The imaginal world exists both macrocosmically and microcosmically, serving as the locus of dreams, prophetic visions, and eschatological events. All descent from the spiritual to the material realm, as well as all ascent in the opposite direction, necessarily passes through the imaginal plane.

Invoking the principle of the “possibility of that which is superior” (imkān al-ashraf), Ṣadrā argues that nothing can exist at a lower level of being without first existing at higher levels, nor can ascent occur without traversing intermediary grades. Thus, every being manifests in three modes: corporeal, imaginal, and spiritual. These levels correspond to the tripartite cosmic structure—jabarūt, malakūt, and mulk—which are unified synthetically within the human being. In the soul’s return journey (al-maʿād), it undergoes three births: into the sensible, imaginal, and spiritual worlds (Moris 2003, p. 138). In each realm, the soul projects a body proportionate to its mode of existence, much like a shadow corresponds to its object. Individual identity is preserved throughout, since the soul remains the enduring principle of unity (ibid.). Essentially, Ṣadrā maintains that the human faculties correspond to these three levels of being: the external senses perceive the corporeal world, imagination apprehends the imaginal realm, and intellect accesses the spiritual domain. The imaginative faculty enables perception of imaginal forms even during earthly life, provided it is sufficiently disengaged from sensory domination, as exemplified by prophets and saints. In the posthumous state, every soul acquires the power to generate forms in accordance with its nature, producing the experiences of paradise or hell (ibid., pp. 145–56). These experiences are not merely subjective but correspond to objective realities in the imaginal world. Unlike sensible perception, where form and object differ, imaginal perception entails identity between representation and existence. Consequently, imaginal joys and sufferings are more intense than their sensible counterparts, owing to the imaginal world’s more unified and intensified mode of being relative to the dispersed character of the sensible realm (ibid.). While Ṣadrā’s account of the imaginal realm situates suffering within a graded ontology of being and manifestation, it leaves open the question of how such experiences are lived, interpreted, and integrated in personal existence. That is, how does suffering disclose meaning within the concrete life of the subject, beyond its ontological placement? To address this, Scheler’s phenomenology of feeling enables a shift from the structures of being to the structures of lived meaning through which suffering can be disclosed.

4. Scheler’s Phenomenology of Suffering

Scheler designates the region of consciousness wherein intuitive manifestation and givenness take place as die Sphäre. His phenomenology is conceived as an attitude (Einstellung), a standpoint from which one encounters and apprehends an essence given wholly within the immanence of consciousness. In this sense, phenomenological experience is, from beginning to end, immanent experience (Scheler 2006, p. 51). For him, suffering is a phenomenologically irreducible, value-disclosive experience that affects the person as a whole, revealing the hierarchy of values, the depth of love, and the existential structure of human finitude rather than serving as a problem to be explained or justified. For Scheler, suffering is philosophically significant because it exposes dimensions of human existence that cannot be captured by cognition alone. It demonstrates that values are not merely conceptual or theoretical constructs but are encountered as lived and affective realities that shape the person from within. In suffering, temporality itself acquires existential density: time is no longer a neutral succession of moments but is experienced through endurance, waiting, and irreversibility. As such, suffering functions as a limit-experience that resists reduction to psychological, biological, or epistemic terms. It exceeds intuition understood narrowly as object-giving perception and instead discloses the depth structure of personal life, where meaning emerges through vulnerability, commitment, and exposure to what cannot be mastered or fully represented.4

In “The Meaning of Suffering,” Scheler analyzes suffering by dismantling the idea that it can be understood as a simple inner state or a direct reaction to external stimuli. He begins by insisting that feeling is always meaningful and structured, even when it takes the form of pain or distress (Scheler 1974, pp. 122–23). A given state of suffering, he argues, can be lived through in opposing ways depending on how it functions within emotional life. While the physical stimuli that trigger pain may remain constant across history, how pain is endured, tolerated, resisted, or even embraced varies widely across cultures and epochs. This shows that suffering is not determined by sensation alone but by the emotional capacities and dispositions through which sensation is taken up. Scheler emphasizes that the same applies to joy: a greater capacity for joy often corresponds not to stronger pleasures but to a refined ability to engage fleeting sensations through emotional functions such as enjoyment (Scheler 1954, p. 41). Beyond these emotional functions, Scheler identifies a higher level at which suffering is shaped by acts of the spiritual person. At this level, suffering acquires its place, weight, and significance within a life as a whole (ibid.). Differences in attentiveness, ethical orientation, evaluative frameworks, and religious or metaphysical interpretation all transform what suffering means and what it yields. Whether suffering is experienced as punishment, purification, correction, or meaningless affliction depends on how it is integrated into a broader understanding of the world and its ultimate ground (Scheler 1974, p. 141). For Scheler, any philosophical account of suffering therefore functions symbolically: it does not merely describe pain but offers a framework through which emotional life is interpreted, ordered, and rendered either meaningful or opaque within the totality of existence (ibid.).

5. Grounding Suffering in Sacrifice

Scheler radicalizes his phenomenology of suffering by grounding it in the concept of sacrifice, which he presents as the most formal and comprehensive category under which all forms of suffering can be understood (ibid., pp. 141–42). For him, suffering is not merely an accidental disturbance within life but expresses a structural logic in which parts are relinquished for the sake of wholes, and lower values are surrendered for higher ones (Colosi 2009, pp. 19–20). Death itself is interpreted as a paradigmatic sacrifice: biologically, it functions as a condition for the continuation and differentiation of life, and metaphysically, it exemplifies the subordination of individual existence to more encompassing orders of being (ibid., pp. 19–20). By extending this logic beyond biology, Scheler argues that pain and suffering manifest a deeper axiological structure in which the advancement of higher forms of life, meaning, or personhood demands real loss (Scheler 1974, p. 142). This move decisively distances his account from Aristotelian functionalism, which explains pain and pleasure merely as signals regulating organic behavior. While Scheler acknowledges the validity of this biological account at a limited level, he insists that it cannot account for why suffering exists at all, nor why pain, rather than some non-harmful signal, is affectively structured into the very framework of life. The intensity and injurious character of pain point beyond instrumental explanations and force the question of meaning onto a metaphysical and theological plane (ibid.).

Scheler therefore rejects any theodicy that attempts to justify suffering solely through natural teleology or rational design. Instead, he emphasizes that the reality of suffering exposes the limits of causal reasoning about God and the world: without an immediate, experiential relation to divine goodness, even minimal pain would undermine belief in an omnipotent and benevolent creator. In this way, sacrifice becomes fundamental not because it explains suffering away, but because it reveals suffering as a constitutive feature of existence that resists reduction, confronts reason with its limits, and demands interpretation at the level of value, personhood, and ultimate meaning (Scheler 1954, p. 44; Shi 2024). Scheler admits that only when pain and suffering are interpreted through the idea of sacrifice does the possibility of a more profound theodicy emerge (Scheler 1974, p. 160). Early Christianity was historically decisive in articulating this perspective by framing suffering not merely as endured by humanity but as taken up by God. In the figure of Christ, God enters the world out of love and undergoes suffering and death in the place of humanity. By relocating suffering within this sacrificial horizon, it is no longer treated solely as an external affliction to be explained or justified, but as a meaningful act bound to love, self-giving, and participation. It is within this framework that suffering can begin to be understood in a way that preserves its gravity while opening it to theological significance or esoteric religious cognition.

6. Scheler on Blessed Suffering

Scheler argues that the Christian understanding of suffering demands far more than a merely passive endurance of pain. Rather than treating suffering as something to be stoically tolerated, Christianity discloses the possibility of blessed suffering. At its core lies the conviction that only the person who lives in dependence upon God can relate to pain and suffering in a genuinely appropriate way. Such a person is not only capable of bearing suffering but can affirm it, love it, and, under certain conditions, even actively seek it. For him, this structure of experience is exemplified in St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, where joy does not arise despite bodily decay and worldly loss but precisely within their progressive destruction. This allows the soul to respond to the visible disintegration of the body and its possessions with an intensifying joy. This occurs because the soul draws the suffering of the world into itself, and through this very incorporation of suffering, becomes more deeply aware of its own salvation and grounding in God than it had been before suffering. It functions not as an obstacle to spiritual awareness, but as a medium through which the soul’s most central orientation toward God becomes more fully disclosed (ibid., pp. 160–61). According to Scheler, the level of experience and proclamation is lived out concretely in the actions of the martyrs. Their extraordinary strength does not derive from anticipation of future happiness in an afterlife, but from an immediately experienced state of grace that persists in the midst of extreme agony (ibid.).

The decisive phenomenological feature here is that happiness is not deferred beyond suffering but is contemporaneous with it, rooted in a deeper level of the person that remains intact even under excruciating bodily pain. Scheler clarifies this layered structure of emotional life through Luther’s response to the death of his daughter Magdalene (ibid., p. 161). Luther’s simultaneous affirmation of spiritual joy and bodily sorrow reveals that emotionally positive and emotionally negative states can coexist without contradiction. This coexistence directly challenges eudaemonism, which reduces human experience to a single scale of pleasure and displeasure and cannot account for such simultaneity.

Against Aristotelian eudaemonism, Scheler insists that emotional life is stratified into distinct levels, ranging from sensible, bodily feelings such as pain and pleasure to the deepest regions of the self, where happiness and despair are experienced (ibid.). At each of these levels, both pleasure and displeasure are possible, and experiences at one level do not mechanically determine those at another. Thus, it is possible to suffer bodily pain joyfully, just as it is possible to experience sensory pleasure unhappily (ibid.). The inner coherence and meaningful pattern of emotional experience at one level largely remains unaffected by the sequence or intensity of feelings at other levels, even as attention shifts among them. The deeper and more central an emotion is, the less it lies under the direct control of the will. Positive emotions at these depths increasingly bear the character of grace rather than achievement. Emotions, therefore, should not be understood primarily as goals intentionally pursued but as sources from which willing and acting emerge across these different levels of the person.

Scheler emphasizes that suffering at the most central emotional level—namely, the unhappiness of the innermost heart—tends to generate compensatory attempts by the will to produce pleasure at more peripheral, sensible levels. Conversely, when the central level of the person is fulfilled, and one is inwardly “happy” with dependence upon God, bodily pain can be endured more easily and even more joyfully (ibid.). From this perspective, hedonism itself appears not as a sign of fulfillment, but as a symptom of despair (Geniusas 2016). He describes its capability of functioning as a process of purification. Through suffering, the person is drawn from the peripheral layers of sensible life into progressively deeper “interior spaces” or “castles of the soul.” (ibid.) Remaining at these depths enables the reception of higher spiritual powers. In this way, suffering may come to be loved—not for its own sake, but as the formative force through which the divine shapes an ideal self. Suffering is thus experienced as the gracious blows of a hammer, by which the divine sculptor fashions a coherent spiritual form from an existence previously fragmented by sensibility and self-centeredness (ibid.).

Scheler’s reference to Thomas à Kempis’ declaration, at the end of his essay, should not be read as a call to masochism or a moral glorification of pain, but a phenomenological confirmation of the deepest structure of suffering (Scheler 1974, p. 163).5 The moment at which affliction becomes “sweet” does not belong to the level of sensible feeling, where pain remains painful, but to the most central stratum of the person, where suffering is integrated into a lived relation to higher values and ultimately to God (ibid.). To “taste” suffering as good for the sake of Christ is to experience a transformation in the meaning of suffering rather than in its sensory content: pain is not abolished, but its place within the whole of personal life is reconfigured (ibid.). In this state, suffering no longer fragments the self or provokes flight into compensatory pleasures; instead, it becomes a medium of inward coherence, purification, and grace. Kempis’ “paradise on earth” highlights, for Scheler, a condition in which the deepest level of the person is fulfilled and anchored in God, allowing peripheral pain to be endured without despair (ibid.). The attempt to flee suffering signals an unresolved disorder at the center of the person, one that condemns the individual to remain pursued by affliction precisely because suffering has not yet been meaningfully integrated into the spiritual form of life.

7. Concluding Notes: Experience and the Non-Object in Ṣadrā and Scheler

A phenomenology of experience and non-objectivity, informed by figures such as Ṣadrā and Scheler, essentially reframes the meaning of suffering by detaching it from purely object-directed intuition and situating it within the limits and transformations of lived experience itself. Suffering should not be reducible to the intuition of an object but should instead appear as a non-objectifiable mode of givenness. It resists full intentional capture because it does not present itself as a stable object toward which consciousness can direct itself. Rather, suffering manifests as a disruption of intentionality, a saturation or fracture in the subject’s capacity to make sense of what is given. In this respect, suffering marks a limit of intuition: it is experienced precisely where intuition fails to stabilize meaning.

Based on this understanding, suffering belongs to the domain of affective and existential disclosure rather than cognitive apprehension. Like Scheler’s analysis of emotional intentionality, suffering reveals values not by representing them but by exposing the subject to their intensity (Geniusas 2016, p. 359). Pain, loss, guilt, or despair do not appear as objects among others; they reconfigure the entire field of experience, altering how time, selfhood, and world are given. Suffering functions as a world-modifying experience, one in which the subjects are no longer sovereign over meaning but are claimed by what exceeds them. Within this framework, suffering acquires a temporal and ethical thickness. This highlights that it cannot be confined to the present moment of intuition; suffering stretches across time: it is remembered, anticipated, and often re-lived. This aligns with a non-reversible, value-laden temporality in which the past cannot simply be bracketed and the future remains genuinely at stake. Suffering, therefore, discloses time as ethically charged, binding the subject to responsibility, endurance, and transformation rather than to detached observation. Suffering can be understood as occurring within an intermediate or imaginal register of experience—a domain that is neither purely sensible nor purely intelligible.

Scheler’s stratification of feelings already undermines the assumption that all experience is structured by object-directed intuition. By distinguishing feelings not only by quality and intensity but by depth, Scheler shows that the most decisive affective experiences do not function as intentional acts toward discrete objects (ibid.). Spiritual feelings such as despair or bliss, which belong to the deepest stratum of emotional life, are not about something; they are ways in which the subject finds itself wholly claimed. This insight anticipates a phenomenology in which suffering cannot be reduced to the intuition of a thing, event, or causal state, but must instead be understood as a mode of givenness that reconfigures the subject’s entire field of experience. This clarifies why suffering resists objectification. Like spiritual feelings, it does not present itself as a stable intentional correlate but as a disruption or saturation of intentionality itself (ibid., p. 361). Rather than offering an object for consciousness to grasp, suffering fractures the subject’s capacity to synthesize meaning. In this sense, suffering marks a limit of intuition—not because something is missing, but because what is given exceeds the form of object-directed apprehension. Scheler’s claim that spiritual feelings permeate all other experiences helps explain how suffering transforms the total atmosphere of lived experience, altering how self, world, and time are disclosed.

Suffering functions as a world-modifying experience in which the subject can no longer claim dominance over meaning but is instead seized by what exceeds them. This reveals the ethical depth of suffering, which implicates the subject not through judgment or choice, but through endurance and responsiveness. Ṣadrā’s metaphysics deepens and radicalizes Scheler’s phenomenological insights. While Scheler shows that certain affective experiences exceed object-intentionality, Ṣadrā provides the ontological framework to explain why this is so. Based on the primacy and gradation of being, experience corresponds to the level of existence at which the soul currently dwells.6 Non-objective experiences, such as suffering, are not deficient intuitions but intensive modes of participation in being itself. As being intensifies, experience becomes more unified, more immediate, and less susceptible to objectification (Geniusas 2016, p. 363). The limits of intuition signal an ontological transition, not an epistemic failure (ibid.). This transition becomes especially clear when suffering is situated within the imaginal register. Neither purely sensible nor purely intelligible, the imaginal is a domain in which form and experience coincide. Suffering in this register does not unfold according to linear, measurable time; it dilates, persists, or returns with a density that resists chronological ordering. This helps explain why suffering often feels interminable or timeless, even when its empirical causes are absent. Based on Scheler’s phenomenology, suffering becomes a saturation of temporality; ontologically, it reflects Ṣadrā’s claim that imaginal being is more unified and intense than corporeal being.

The key can be found in Ṣadrā’s metaphysics, understood as the ultimate limit of intuition, and coincides with the transcendence of objectivity itself. As being intensifies toward the intelligible and the divine, experience becomes increasingly unified and non-dual, leaving behind the subject–object structure presupposed by intuition. At this horizon, experience is no longer something that can be intuited at all; it is something that is lived as being. From this perspective, the limits of intuition do not mark the end of experience but its fulfillment in a higher ontological mode. In Ṣadrā’s philosophy of being, the limits of intuition are not deficiencies to be overcome but ontological indicators. They reveal moments where experience shifts from object-directed perception to existential participation, from representation to transformation, and from knowing to being (Kaln 2010, p. 205).

Since imaginal experience is shaped by the soul’s dispositions, suffering discloses something essential about the subject’s formation. This does not imply moral voluntarism or culpability, but rather existential revelation. It functions as a mode of self-disclosure without reflection: the subject encounters itself as already involved, already shaped, and therefore responsible in a non-juridical, non-deliberative sense. This resonates with Scheler’s view that the deepest feelings grasp the person in her entirety, revealing not isolated states but the structure of a life. From both Schelerian and Ṣadrāean perspectives, suffering possesses a cognitive force without taking the form of propositional knowledge. What suffering “knows” is not a fact about the world but a truth about the soul’s relation to being. For Scheler, this truth is disclosed through value-response, and for Ṣadrā, through intensified participation in existence. In both cases, suffering resists conceptual articulation not because it is opaque or irrational, but because it belongs to a level in which knowing and being are inseparable. Its resistance to intuition marks not a failure of experience but a boundary at which experience becomes transformative rather than representational.

At this boundary, suffering destabilizes both sensible coherence and intelligible explanation. The world loses its taken-for-granted familiarity, while conceptual frameworks fail to console or explain that loss. Yet this destabilization is not nihilistic. In Ṣadrā’s metaphysics of substantial motion, rupture and intensification belong to the same ontological process. Phenomenologically, suffering marks a threshold where experience ceases to be object-oriented and becomes a site of becoming whose outcome is genuinely undecidable. It is here that suffering reveals itself as a limit-experience: real without being objectifiable, painful without being merely negative, and revelatory without being instrumentalized. In this way, a phenomenology informed by both Scheler and Ṣadrā allows suffering to be understood as a site of non-objective meaning. It shows that not all meaning appears as an object of intuition; some meanings are lived through, endured, and only afterward articulated. The limits of intuition do not constrain the depth of experience but instead disclose the point at which experience shifts from representation to participation, from knowing to being. Suffering, at this limit, becomes not the negation of meaning but one of its most intensive modes of manifestation.