Human self-awareness and the self-awareness of incorporeal lights are equivalent

The concept of self-awareness informs the epistemological and ontological aspects of Suhrawardi’s metaphysic of lights. Building upon a basic type of self-awareness found in Avicenna (but without its inference to the substantiality of the human soul) and the selfhood (of the contemplative soul) of the Arabic Plotinus, Suhrawardi introduces a pre-cognitive level of self-consciousness or self-awareness, logically prior to any distinction between subject and object (Kaukua 2011, 141–4). Self-awaren