Ibn Sina, Abu 'Ali al-Husayn (980-1037)
Ibn Sina, Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn (980-1037) Ibn Sina
(Avicenna) is one of the foremost
philosophers in the Medieval
Hellenistic Islamic tradition that
also includes al-Farabi and Ibn
Rushd. His philosophical theory is a
comprehensive, detailed and
rationalistic account of the nature
of God and Being, in which he finds
a systematic place for the corporeal
world, spirit, insight, and the
varieties of logical thought
including dialectic, rhetoric and
poetry.
Central to Ibn Sina’s
philosophy is his concept of reality
and reasoning. Reason, in his
scheme, can allow progress through
various levels of understanding and
can finally lead to God, the
ultimate truth. He stresses the
importance of gaining knowledge, and
develops a theory of knowledge based
on four faculties: sense perception,
retention, imagination and
estimation. Imagination has the
principal role in intellection, as
it can compare and construct images
which give it access to universals.
Again the ultimate object of
knowledge is God, the pure
intellect. In metaphysics, Ibn Sina
makes a distinction between essence
and existence; essence considers
only the nature of things, and
should be considered apart from
their mental and physical
realization. This distinction
applies to all things except God,
whom Ibn Sina identifies as the
first cause and therefore both
essence and existence. He also
argued that the soul is incorporeal
and cannot be destroyed. The soul,
in his view, is an agent with choice
in this world between good and evil,
which in turn leads to reward or
punishment. Reference has sometimes
been made to Ibn Sina’s supposed
mysticism, but this would appear to
be based on a misreading by Western
philosophers of parts of his work.
As one of the most important
practitioners of philosophy, Ibn
Sina exercised a strong influence
over both other Islamic philosophers
and medieval Europe. His work was
one of the main targets of al-Ghazali’s
attack on Hellenistic influences in
Islam.
In Latin translations, his
works influenced many Christian
philosophers, most notably Thomas
Aquinas. 1 Biography Ibn Sina was
born in AH 370/AD 980 near Bukhara
in Central Asia, where his father
governed a village in one of the
royal estates. At thirteen, Ibn Sina
began a study of medicine that
resulted in ‘distinguished
physicians… reading the science of
medicine under [him]’ (Sirat al-shaykh
al-ra’is (The Life of Ibn Sina):
27). His medical expertise brought
him to the attention of the Sultan
of Bukhara, Nuh ibn Mansur, whom he
treated successfully; as a result he
was given permission to use the
sultan’s library and its rare
manuscripts, allowing him to
continue his research into modes of
knowledge. When the sultan died, the
heir to the throne, ‘Ali ibn Shams
al-Dawla, asked Ibn Sina to continue
as vizier, but the philosopher was
negotiating to join the forces of
another son of the late king, Ala
al-Dawla, and so went into hiding.
During this time he composed his
major philosophical treatise, Kitab
al-shifa’ (Book of Healing), a
comprehensive account of learning
that ranges from logic and
mathematics to metaphysics and the
afterlife. While he was writing the
section on logic Ibn Sina was
arrested and imprisoned, but he
escaped to Isfahan, disguised as a
Sufi, and joined Ala al-Dawla.
While
in the service of the latter he
completed al-Shifa’ and produced
the Kitab al-najat (Book of
Salvation), an abridgment of al-Shifa’.
He also produced at least two major
works on logic: one, al-Mantiq,
translated as The Propositional
Logic of Ibn Sina, was a commentary
on Aristotle’s Prior Analytics and
forms part of al-Shifa’; the
other, al-Isharat wa-’l-tanbihat
(Remarks and Admonitions), seems to
be written in the ‘indicative
mode’, where the reader must
participate by working out the steps
leading from the stated premises to
proposed conclusions. He also
produced a treatise on definitions
and a summary of the theoretical
sciences, together with a number of
psychological, religious and other
works; the latter include works on
astronomy, medicine, philology and
zoology, as well as poems and an
allegorical work, Hayy ibn Yaqzan
(The Living Son of the Vigilant).
His biographer also mentions
numerous short works on logic and
metaphysics, and a book on ‘Fair
Judgment’ that was lost when his
prince’s fortunes suffered a turn.
Ibn Sina’s philosophical and
medical work and his political
involvement continued until his
death.
2 Reason and reality Ibn
Sina’s autobiography parallels his
allegorical work, Hayy ibn Yaqzan.
Both clarify how it is possible for
individuals by themselves to arrive
at the ultimate truths about
reality, being and God. The
autobiography shows how Ibn Sina
more or less taught himself,
although with particular kinds of
help at significant moments, and
proceeded through various levels of
sophistication until he arrived at
ultimate truths. Such progress was
possible because of Ibn Sina’s
conception of reality and reasoning.
He maintains that God, the principle
of all existence, is pure intellect,
from whom other existing things such
as minds, bodies and other objects
all emanate, and therefore to whom
they are all necessarily related.
That necessity, once it is fully
understood, is rational and allows
existents to be inferred from each
other and, ultimately, from God. In
effect, the totality of
intelligibles is structured
syllogistically and human knowledge
consists of the mind’s reception
and grasp of intelligible being.
Since knowledge consists of grasping
syllogistically structured intelligibles, it requires the use
of reasoning to follow the relations
between intelligibles. Among these
intelligibles are first principles
that include both concepts such as
‘the existent’, ‘the thing’
and ‘the necessary’, that make
up the categories, and the truths of
logic, including the first-figure
syllogistics, all of which are
basic, primitive and obvious. They
cannot be explained further since
all explanation and thought proceeds
only on their basis. The rules of
logic are also crucial to human
development. Ibn Sina’s stand on
the fundamental nature of
categorical concepts and logical
forms follows central features of
Aristotle’s thought in the Prior
Analytics (see Aristotle §§4-7).
Borrowing from Aristotle, he also
singles out a capacity for a mental
act in which the knower
spontaneously hits upon the middle
term of a syllogism. Since rational
arguments proceed syllogistically,
the ability to hit upon the middle
term is the ability to move an
argument forward by seeing how given
premises yield appropriate
conclusions. It allows the person
possessing this ability to develop
arguments, to recognize the
inferential relations between
syllogisms. Moreover, since reality
is structured syllogistically, the
ability to hit upon the middle term
and to develop arguments is crucial
to moving knowledge of reality
forward. Ibn Sina holds that it is
important to gain knowledge.
Grasp
of the intelligibles determines the
fate of the rational soul in the
hereafter, and therefore is crucial
to human activity. When the human
intellect grasps these intelligibles
it comes into contact with the
Active Intellect, a level of being
that emanates ultimately from God,
and receives a ‘divine
effluence’. People may be ordered
according to their capacity for
gaining knowledge, and thus by their
possession and development of the
capacity for hitting on the middle
term. At the highest point is the
prophet, who knows the intelligibles
all at once, or nearly so. He has a
pure rational soul and can know the
intelligibles in their proper
syllogistic order, including their
middle terms. At the other end lies
the impure person lacking in the
capacity for developing arguments.
Most people are in between these
extremes, but they may improve their
capacity for grasping the middle
term by developing a balanced
temperament and purity of soul (see
Logic in Islamic philosophy §1).
In
relation to the older debate about
the respective scopes of grammar and
logic, Ibn Sina argues that since
logic deals with concepts that can
be abstracted from sensible
material, it also escapes the
contingencies of the latter.
Language and grammar govern sensible
material and therefore have a
different domain; indeed, languages
are various and their rules of
operation, their grasp of sensible
material, are likewise articulated
variously (see Language, philosophy
of). Nevertheless, languages make
available the abstracted concepts
whose operation is governed by
logic; yet if language deals with
contingencies, it is not clear how
it can grasp or make available the
objects of logic. At times, as for
example in al-Isharat, Ibn Sina
suggests that languages generally
share a structure. 3 Theory of
knowledge In his theory of
knowledge, Ibn Sina identifies the
mental faculties of the soul in
terms of their epistemological
function. As the discussion of logic
in §2 has already suggested,
knowledge begins with abstraction.
Sense perception, being already
mental, is the form of the object
perceived (see Sense and reference
§1). Sense perception responds to
the particular with its given form
and material accidents. As a mental
event, being a perception of an
object rather than the object
itself, perception occurs in the
particular.
To analyse this
response, classifying its formal
features in abstraction from
material accidents, we must both
retain the images given by sensation
and also manipulate them by
disconnecting parts and aligning
them according to their formal and
other properties. However, retention
and manipulation are distinct
epistemological functions, and
cannot depend on the same
psychological faculty; therefore Ibn
Sina distinguishes faculties of
relation and manipulation as
appropriate to those diverse
epistemological functions (see
Epistemology in Islamic philosophy
§4). Ibn Sina identifies the
retentive faculty as
‘representation’ and charges the
imagination with the task of
reproducing and manipulating images.
To conceptualize our experience and
to order it according to its
qualities, we must have and be able
to reinvoke images of what we
experienced but is now absent. For
this we need sensation and
representation at least; in
addition, to order and classify the
content of representation, we must
be able to discriminate, separate
out and recombine parts of images,
and therefore must possess
imagination and reason. To think
about a black flag we must be able
to analyse its colour, separating
this quality from others, or its
part in the image from other images,
and classify it with other black
things, thereby showing that the
concept of black applies to all such
objects and their images.
Imagination carries out this
manipulation, allowing us to produce
images of objects we have not seen
in fact out of the images of things
we have experienced, and thereby
also generating images for
intelligibles and prophecies. Beyond
sense perception, retention and
imagination, Ibn Sina locates
estimation (wahm). This is a faculty
for perceiving non-sensible
‘intentions that exist in the
individual sensible objects’.
A
sheep flees a wolf because it
estimates that the animal may do it
harm; this estimation is more than
representation and imagination,
since it includes an intention that
is additional to the perceived and
abstracted form and concept of the
animal. Finally, there may be a
faculty that retains the content of wahm, the meanings of images. Ibn
Sina also relies on a faculty of
common sense, involving awareness of
the work and products of all the
other faculties, which interrelates
these features. Of these faculties,
imagination has a principal role in
intellection. Its comparison and
construction of images with given
meanings gives it access to
universals in that it is able to
think of the universal by
manipulating images (see
Universals). However, Ibn Sina
explains this process of grasping
the universal, this emergence of the
universal in the human mind, as the
result of an action on the mind by
the Active Intellect. This intellect
is the last of ten cosmic intellects
that stand below God. In other
words, the manipulation of images
does not by itself procure a grasp
of universals so much as train the
mind to think the universals when
they are given to the mind by the
Active Intellect. Once achieved, the
processes undergone in training
inform the mind so that the latter
can attend directly to the Active
Intellect when required. Such direct
access is crucial since the soul
lacks any faculty for retaining
universals and therefore repeatedly
needs fresh access to the Active
Intellect. As the highest point
above the Active Intellect, God, the
pure intellect, is also the highest
object of human knowledge. All sense
experience, logic and the faculties
of the human soul are therefore
directed at grasping the fundamental
structure of reality as it emanates
from that source and, through
various levels of being down to the
Active Intellect, becomes available
to human thought through reason or,
in the case of prophets, intuition.
By this conception, then, there is a
close relation between logic,
thought, experience, the grasp of
the ultimate structure of reality
and an understanding of God. As the
highest and purest intellect, God is
the source of all the existent
things in the world. The latter
emanate from that pure high
intellect, and they are ordered
according to a necessity that we can
grasp by the use of rational
conceptual thought (see Neoplatonism
in Islamic philosophy). These
interconnections become clearer in
Ibn Sina’s metaphysics. 4
Metaphysics Metaphysics examines
existence as such, ‘absolute
existence’ (al-wujud al-mutlaq) or
existence so far as it exists. Ibn
Sina relies on the one hand on the
distinction in Aristotle’s Prior
Analytics between the principles
basic to a scientific or
mathematical grasp of the world,
including the four causes, and on
the other hand the subject of
metaphysics, the prime or ultimate
cause of all things - God. In
relation to the first issue, Ibn
Sina recognizes that observation of
regularities in nature fails to
establish their necessity. At best
it evinces the existence of a
relation of concomitance between
events.
To establish the necessity
implicated in causality, we must
recognize that merely accidental
regularities would be unlikely to
occur always, or even at all, and
certainly not with the regularity
that events can exhibit (see
Causality and necessity in Islamic
thought). Thus, we may expect that
such regularities must be the
necessary result of the essential
properties of the objects in
question. In developing this
distinction between the principles
and subject of metaphysics, Ibn Sina
makes another distinction between
essence and existence, one that
applies to everything except God.
Essence and existence are distinct
in that we cannot infer from the
essence of something that it must
exist (see Existence). Essence
considers only the nature of things,
and while this may be realized in
particular real circumstances or as
an item in the mind with its
attendant conditions, nevertheless
essence can be considered for itself
apart from that mental and physical
realization.
Essences exist in
supra-human intelligences and also
in the human mind. Further, if
essence is distinct from existence
in the way Ibn Sina is proposing,
then both the existence and the
non-existence of the essence may
occur, and each may call for
explanation. 5 The existence of God
The above distinctions enter into
the central subject matter of
metaphysics, that is, God and the
proof of his existence. Scholars
propose that the most detailed and
comprehensive of Ibn Sina’s
arguments for God’s existence
occurs in the ‘Metaphysics’
section of al-Shifa’ (Gutas 1988;
Mamura 1962; Morewedge 1972). We
know from the Categories of
Aristotle that existence is either
necessary or possible. If an
existence were only possible, then
we could argue that it would
presuppose a necessary existence,
for as a merely possible existence,
it need not have existed and would
need some additional factor to bring
about its existence rather than its
non-existence. That is, the possible
existence, in order to be existent,
must have been necessitated by
something else.
Yet that something
else cannot be another merely
possible existence since the latter
would itself stand in need of some
other necessitation in order to
bring it about, or would lead to an
infinite regress without explaining
why the merely possible existence
does exist. From this point, Ibn
Sina proposes that an essential
cause and its effect will coexist
and cannot be part of an infinite
chain; the nexus of causes and
effects must have a first cause,
which exists necessarily for itself:
God (see God, arguments for the
existence of §1). From his proof of
God’s existence, Ibn Sina goes on
to explain how the world and its
order emanates from God. Whereas
Aristotle (§16) himself did not
relate the Active Intellect that may
be implied in On the Soul III with the first,
ever-thinking cause of the universal
found in Book XII of his
Metaphysics, later commentators on
his work (for example, Alexander of
Aphrodisias) identified the two,
making the Active Intellect, the
principle that brings about the
passage of the human intellect from
possibility to actuality, into the
first cause of the universe.
Together with this is the proof of
God’s existence that sees him not
only as the prime mover but also as
the first existent. God’s
self-knowledge consist in an eternal
act that results in or brings about
a first intelligence or awareness.
This first intelligence conceives or
cognizes the necessity of God’s
existence, the necessity of
its own existence, and its own
existence as possible. From these
acts of conception, other existents
arise: another intelligence, a
celestial soul and a celestial body,
respectively. The last constitutes the first sphere
of the universe, and when the second
intelligence engages in its own
cognitive act, it constitutes the
level of fixed stars as well as
another level of intelligence that,
in turn, produces another
intelligence and another level of
body. The last such intelligence
that emanates from the successive
acts of knowing is the Active
Intellect, that produces our world.
Such emanation cannot continue
indefinitely; although being may
proceed from intelligence, not every
intelligence containing the same
aspects will produce the same
effects. Successive intelligences
have diminished power, and the
active intellect, standing tenth in
the hierarchy, no longer possesses
the power to emanate eternal beings.
None of these proposals by Ibn Sina give grounds
for supposing that he was committed
to
mysticism (for an opposing view, see Mystical
philosophy in Islam §1).
His so
called ‘Eastern philosophy’,
usually understood to contain his
mystical doctrines, seems to be an
entirely Western invention that over
the last two hundred years has been
read into Ibn Sina’s work (see
Gutas 1988). Nevertheless, Ibn Sina
combines his Aristotelianism with a
religious interest, seeking to
explain prophecy as having its basis
in a direct openness of the
prophet’s mind to the Active
Intellect, through which the middle
terms of syllogisms, the syllogisms
themselves and their conclusions
become available without the
procedure of working out proofs.
Sometimes the prophet gains insight
through imagination, and expresses
his insight in figurative terms. It
is also possible for the imagination
to gain contact with the souls of
the higher spheres, allowing the
prophet to envisage the future in
some figurative form. There may also
be other varieties of prophecy.
6 The soul
In all these dealings with prophecy, knowledge and
metaphysics, Ibn Sina takes it that
the entity involved is the human
soul. In al-Shifa’, he proposes
that the soul must be an incorporeal
substance because intellectual
thoughts themselves are indivisible.
Presumably he means that a coherent
thought, involving concepts in some
determinate order, cannot be had in
parts by different intellects and
still remain a single coherent
thought. In order to be a coherent
single unity, a coherent thought
must be had by a single, unified
intellect rather than, for example,
one intellect having one part of the
thought, another soul a separate
part of the thought and yet a third
intellect
having a third distinct part of the same thought.
In other words, a coherent thought
is indivisible and can be present as
such only to an intellect that is
similarly unified or indivisible.
However, corporeal matter is
divisible; therefore the indivisible
intellect that is necessary for
coherent thought cannot be
corporeal. It must therefore be
incorporeal, since those are the
only two available possibilities. For Ibn Sina, that the soul is incorporeal implies also that
it must be immortal: the decay and
destruction of the body does not
affect the soul. There are basically
three relations to the corporeal
body that might also threaten the
soul but, Ibn Sina proposes, none of
these relations holds true of the
incorporeal soul, which therefore
must be immortal. If the body were a
cause of the soul’s existence, or
if body and soul depended on each
other necessarily for their
existence, or if the soul logically
depended on the body, then the
destruction or decay of the body
would determine the existence of the
soul. However, the body is not a
cause of the soul in any of the four
senses of cause; both are
substances, corporeal and
incorporeal, and therefore as
substances they must be independent
of each other; and the body changes
and decays as a result of its
independent causes and substances,
not because of changes in the soul,
and therefore it does not follow
that any change in the body,
including death, must determine the
existence of the soul. Even if the
emergence of the human soul implies
a role for the body, the role of
this corporeal matter is only
accidental.
To this explanation that the
destruction of the body does not
entail or cause the destruction of
the soul, Ibn Sina adds an argument
that the destruction of the soul
cannot be caused by anything.
Composite existing objects are
subject to destruction; by contrast,
the soul as a simple incorporeal
being is not subject to destruction.
Moreover, since the soul is not a
compound of matter and form,
it may be generated but it
does not suffer the destruction that
afflicts all generated things that
are composed of form and matter.
Similarly, even if we could identify
the soul as a compound, for it to
have unity that compound must itself
be integrated as a unity, and the
principle of this unity of the soul
must be simple; and, so far as the
principle involves an ontological
commitment to existence, being
simple and incorporeal it must
therefore be indestructible (see
Soul in Islamic philosophy).
7 Reward and punishment
From the indestructibility of the soul arise
questions about the character of the
soul, what the soul may expect in a
world emanating from God, and what
its position will be in the cosmic
system. Since Ibn Sina maintains
that souls retain their identity
into immortality, we may also ask
about their destiny and how this is
determined. Finally, since Ibn Sina
also wants to ascribe punishment and
reward to such souls, he needs to
explain how there may be both
destiny and punishment. The need for punishment depends on the possibility of evil,
and Ibn Sina’s examination
maintains that moral and other evils
afflict individuals rather than
species. Evils are usually an
accidental result of things that
otherwise produce good. God produces
more good than evil when he produces
this sublunary world, and abandoning an
overwhelmingly good practice because
of a ‘rare evil’ would be a
privation of good. For example, fire
is useful and therefore good, even
if it harms people on occasion (see
Evil, problem of). God might have
created a world in another existence
that was entirely free of the evil
present in this one, but that would
preclude all the greater goods
available in this world, despite the
rare evil it also contains. Thus,
God generates a world that contains
good and evil and the agent, the
soul, acts in this world; the
rewards and punishments it gains in
its existence beyond this world are
the result of its choices in this
world, and there can be both destiny
and punishment because the world and
its order are precisely what give
souls a choice between good and
evil.
8 Poetry, character and society
Identifying poetic language as imaginative, Ibn
Sina relies on the ability of the
faculty of
imagination to construct images to argue that
poetic language can bear a
distinction between
premises, argument and conclusion, and allows for a
conception of poetic syllogism.
Aristotle’s definition of a syllogism was that if
certain statements are accepted,
then certain other statements must
also necessarily be accepted (see
Aristotle §5). To explain this
syllogistic structure of poetic
language, Ibn Sina first identifies
poetic premises as resemblances
formed by poets that produce ‘an
astonishing effect of distress or
pleasure’ (see Poetry).
The resemblances essayed by
poets and the comparisons they put
forward in poems, when these are
striking, original and so on,
produce an
‘astonishing effect’ or
‘feeling of wonder’ in the
listener or reader. ‘The evening
of life’ compares the spans of a
day and a life, bringing the
connotations of the day to explain
some characteristics of a lifespan.
To find this use of poetic language
meaningful, the suggestion is that
we need to see the comparison as the
conclusion of a syllogism. A premise
of this syllogism would be that days
have a span that resembles or is
comparable to the progression of a
life. This resemblance is striking,
novel and insightful, and
understanding its juxtaposition of
days and lives leads subjects to
feel wonder or astonishment. Next, pleasure occurs in this consideration of the poetic
syllogism as the basis of our
imaginative
assent, paralleling assent in, for example, the
demonstrative syllogism: once we
have accepted the premise, we are
led to accept the associations and
imaginative constructions that
result; once we accept the
comparison between days and lives,
we can understand and appreciate the
comparison between old age and
evening. Ibn Sina also finds other
parallels between poetic language
and meaningful arguments, showing
that pleasure in imaginative assent
can be expected of other subjects;
assent is therefore more than an
expression of personal preferences.
This validity of poetic language
makes it possible for Ibn Sina to
argue that beauty in poetic language
has a moral value that sustains and
depends on relations of justice
between autonomous members of a
community. In his commentary on
Aristotle’s Poetics, however, he
combines this with a claim that
different kinds of poetic language
will suit different kinds of
characters. Comedy suits people
who are base and uncouth, while tragedy attracts an
audience of noble characters (see
Aesthetics in Islamic philosophy).
9 Links to the West
Latin versions of some of Ibn Sina’s works began
to appear in the early thirteenth
century. The best known
philosophical work to be translated
was his Kitab al-shifa’, although
the translation did not include the
sections on mathematics or large
sections of the logic. Translations
made at Toledo include the Kitab al-najat
and the Kitab al-ilahiyat
(Metaphysics) in its entirety. Other
sections on natural science were
translated at Burgos and for the
King of Sicily. Gerard of Cremona
translated Ibn Sina’s al-Qanun
fi’l-tibb (Canon on Medicine). At
Barcelona, another philosophical
work, part of the Kitab al-nafs
(Book of the Soul), was translated
early in the fourteenth century. His
late work on logic, al-Isharat
wa-’l-tanbihat, seems to have been
translated in part and is cited in
other works. His commentaries on On
the Soul were known to Thomas
Aquinas and Albert the Great, who
cite them extensively in their own
discussions.
These and other translations of Ibn Sina’s works
made up the core of a body of
literature that was available for
study. By the early thirteenth
century, his works were studied not
only in relation to Neoplatonists
such as Augustine and Duns Scotus,
but were used also in study of
Aristotle. Consequently, they were
banned in 1210 when the synod at
Paris prohibited the reading of
Aristotle and of ‘summae’ and
‘commenta’ of his work. The
force of the ban was local and only
covered the teaching of this
subject: the texts were read and
taught at Toulouse in 1229. As late
as the sixteenth century there were
other translations of short works by
Ibn Sina into Latin, for example by
Andrea Alpago of Belluno (see
Aristotelianism, medieval §3;
Islamic philosophy:
transmission into Western Europe; Translators).
See also: Aesthetics in Islamic philosophy;
Aristotelianism in Islamic
philosophy; Epistemology in Islamic
philosophy; Logic in Islamic
philosophy; Soul in Islamic
philosophy; Islamic philosophy:
transmission into Western Europe
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