A Teacher
Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)
The Necessary Being and the immaterial self-aware soul
The transmission
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā, known in the Latin West as Avicenna, was a Persian polymath born around 980 CE near Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan, and died in 1037. A prodigy who reportedly mastered the Qurʾan, logic, and medicine in youth, he served various courts as physician and minister while composing an immense body of work, most famously the philosophical encyclopedia The Book of Healing (Kitāb al-Shifāʾ), written largely between 1014 and 1027, and the medical Canon of Medicine.
Building on Aristotle and the Neoplatonic emanationism transmitted through Al-Farabi, he constructed the most systematic synthesis of Greek philosophy and Islamic metaphysics of his age. At the heart of Avicenna’s system is the distinction between essence and existence, culminating in the Necessary Being (wājib al-wujūd): the one reality whose existence is identical with its essence and from which all contingent things emanate in a graded hierarchy of intellects.
Equally influential is his “floating man” (or “flying man”) thought experiment, in which a person created fully formed but suspended in the void, deprived of all sensation, would still affirm the existence of his own self—an argument for the soul as an immaterial, self-knowing substance independent of the body.
This claim that self-awareness is primary and non-bodily seeds a current of thought about consciousness as a fundamental, irreducible reality.
What they gave
The self-knowing soul: The “floating man” argues that self-awareness is immediate and independent of the senses, an early statement that consciousness is foundational rather than derived from matter.
- The Necessary Being and emanation: Frames all of reality as a single graded outflow from one necessary source, an ancestor of “all is one” metaphysics.
- The active intellect as illuminator: Holds that human knowing is completed by conjunction with a higher cosmic Intellect, a model of inner illumination later spiritualized by the Illuminationist and Sufi streams.
- Mind over body in medicine: His clinical writings acknowledge the influence of imagination and emotion on bodily states, an early thread in psychosomatic thinking.
In their words
These bodily members that we have are really only just like clothes that, because they have always been associated with us, we have come to think of as parts of ourselves. When we imagine our selves, we do not imagine them bare; rather, we imagine [our selves] to have enveloping bodies. The reason for that is the permanent association [of the two].
Then let the subject consider whether he would affirm the existence of his self. There is no doubt that he would affirm his own existence, although not affirming the reality of any of his limbs or inner organs, his bowels, or heart or brain or any external thing.
The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.
Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials.
Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.
God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change.
Religious law makes it illegal for the ignorant to drink wine, but intelligence makes it legal for the intellectual.
There is no doubt that he would affirm his own existence, although not affirming the reality of any of his limbs or inner organs, his bowels, or heart or brain or any external thing.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Aristotle’s metaphysics and psychology; Neoplatonic emanation via Plotinus; the philosophical system of Al-Farabi.
- Taught / Influenced: Al-Ghazali (who critiqued him), Suhrawardi’s Illuminationism, Mulla Sadra’s existential metaphysics, and the Latin Scholastics including Aquinas and Albertus Magnus.
Revelations they taught
Their Practices 2
Essential Works
- The Canon of Medicine (Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb)c.1025
- The Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa)c.1027