Tajalli and the Ontological Structure of Manifestation: Toward a Luminous Metaphysics

Tajalli Between Ibn ʿArabi and Ontological Phenomenology The ontological significance of tajalli cannot be understood apart from its systematic articulation in the metaphysics of Ibn ʿArabi. In his vision, Being is not a static substrate but a perpetual self-disclosure of the Real through graded determinations. The cosmos is neither independent nor illusory; it is the locus of manifestation. Existence unfolds through successive determinations of the Divine Names, each level reflecting a particular intensity of disclosure. What appears as multiplicity is not fragmentation but differentiation within unity. Tajalli, therefore, does not describe a mystical experience alone; it describes the ontological grammar of reality. Within this framework, the world is not “other” than the Real in a dualistic sense. Nor is it identical in a simplistic monism. Rather, it is relationally constituted through manifestation. Each entity is a locus of self-disclosure, a mirror reflecting a particular Name. Ontology becomes dynamic: Being is not possessed but revealed. The Real remains transcendent in essence yet immanent in manifestation. This tension between transcendence and disclosure is resolved not through abstraction but through graded ontology. It is precisely at this point that Henry Corbin’s intervention becomes decisive. Corbin recognized that Ibn ʿArabi’s metaphysics was not merely theological speculation but a rigorous ontology articulated through symbolic language. By translating tajalli into the language of being and manifestation, Corbin reintroduced vertical structure into philosophical discourse. He did not reduce Ibn ʿArabi to mysticism; he presented him as a thinker of ontological disclosure. The imaginal world, in Corbin’s reading, becomes the intermediate domain in which tajalli assumes form without collapsing into materiality. It is the ontological bridge that preserves hierarchy while preventing dualism. Corbin’s importance lies not in historical commentary but in ontological rearticulation. He demonstrated that tajalli offers a structural alternative to the flattening of modern ontology. In