It is, however, in fact not true that cognition can be so mechanically and deterministically produced. The system is worked out and systematized by Ibn Sina, who strives to derive God's attributes of knowledge, creation, power, will, etc., from His simple unchanging being, or, rather, to show that these attributes are nothing but the fact of His existence. II, passim) has traced the influence of certain of the ideas of the Shaikh al-Ra'is down to modern times. In the East, indeed, his system has dominated the Muslim philosophical tradition right down to the modern era when his place is being given to some modern Western thinkers by those who have been educated in modern universities. And this is the perennial argument for the two-substance theory, viz.
At the intellectual level, the necessity of the prophetic revelation is proved by an argument elaborated on the basis of a remark of Aristotle (Anal. For, suppose, a man chooses to think about a certain problem. Instead of working back from a supposed effect to its cause, we work forward from an indubitable premise to a conclusion. This is Ibn Sina's principle of existence stated in brief; we shall now analyse it according to the complex materials which Ibn Sina has left us. To be sure, the elements of his doctrines are Greek, and certain reformulations of Greek doctrines in his writings are also to be found in al-Farabi (to whom Ibn Sina's debt is immense) in varying degrees of development; but our task here is to state, analyse, and appreciate Ibn Sina's teaching. From the metaphysical point of view, the theory seeks to supplement the traditional Aristotelian analysis of an existent into two constituent elements, as it were, viz., form and matter. Ibn Sina's doctrine of Being, like those of earlier Muslim philosophers, e. g., al-Farabi, is emanationistic. IMPORTANT : All content hosted onAl-Islam.orgis solely for non-commercial purposes and with the permission of original copyright holders. Since God is the emanative cause of all existents, He knows both these existents and the relations subsisting between them. But to what action does it impel? Still less satisfactory is the treatment of the historic influence of Ibn Sina's scientific thought, although again beginnings have been made, notably by Professor Sarton and Dr. Crombie's work (see also Avicenna, Scientist & Philosopher, edited by G. M. Wickens, London, 1952, Chaps. Just as, we are told, the ideas of health present in the doctor's mind produce actual health in a patient, so the soul acts on the body; only the doctor produces cure through media and instruments, but the soul does it without any instruments. Later Muslim philosophers, such as al-Frb (10th century) and Avicenna (11th century) under the influence of Neoplatonism conceived of creation as a gradual process. II, p. Further, the soul, as being incorporeal, is a simple substance and this ensures for it indestructibility and survival, after its origination, even when its body is destroyed. It is of the nature of imagination to symbolize and give flesh and blood to our thoughts, our desires, and even our physiological inclinations. by temporal boundaries: All sincere students of man and his works in Asia, at This phenomenon of direct association can also become indirect and irrational. and imaginative aspects of Oriental civilizations, especially of philosophy, Hence Ibn Sina says that the prophet, in so far as he is human, is accidentally, not essentially, the active intellect (for the meaning of the term accidental, see the first section of this chapter). This insight, creative of knowledge and values, is termed by Ibn Sina the active intellect and identified with the angel of revelation. It involves more than one point of view. This occurs through association of ideas or images of memory. In this doctrine, Ibn Sina drastically modifies the Muslim dogmatic theology by declaring that the Qur'i.nic revelation is, by and large, if not all, symbolic of truth, not the literal truth, but that it must remain the literal truth for the masses (this does not mean that the Qur'an is not the Word of God; indeed, as we shall see, it is in a sense literally the Word of God); further, that the Law, although it must be observed by everyone, is also partly symbolic and partly pedagogical and, therefore, an essentially lower discipline than philosophic pursuits. In the Stoics, again, we have the perceptual-moral theory of the oikeiosis or appropriation, according to which whatever is perceived by the external senses is interpreted internally by the soul as the bearer of certain values. This is not the case with any other being, for in no other case is the existence identical with the essence, otherwise whenever, for example, an Eskimo who has never seen an elephant, conceives of one, he would ipso facto know that elephants exist. At the most common level, the influence of the mind on the body is visible in voluntary movement: whenever the mind wills to move the body, the body obeys. 65-69; also ibid. The American Oriental Society is the oldest learned society in the United States Ibn Sina, therefore, totally rejects the idea of the possible identity of two souls or of the ego becoming fused with the Divine Ego, and he emphasizes that the survival must be individual. Ibn Sina seems to be aware that the position is liable to objections. God, al-Ghazl maintained, creates with absolute will and freedom, and theories of necessary overflowing and emanation lead logically to the denial of the absoluteness of the divine active will. Very ingenious though this theory is and, we think, successful in showing that sense-perception is not the only way to know the particulars, it is obvious that it cannot avoid the introduction of time factor, and, therefore, change in divine knowledge. This use of the term accident is quite pervasive in Ibn Sina's philosophy and, without knowing its correct significance, one would be necessarily led to misinterpret some of his basic doctrines. We shall return to its transcendence when we discuss Ibn Sina's theory of knowledge in the next section. A dog which has suffered pain in the past from being beaten by a stick or a stone, associates the image of the object and the intention of pain and, when it sees the object again, at once runs away.
This concerns the relationship of a concrete existent to its essence or specific form, which Ibn Sina also calls accidental. What is scientifically new in Ibn Sina is that he also explains phenomena like magic, suggestion, and hypnosis, and, in general, the influence of one mind on other bodies and minds on these lines, i, e., by referring them to the properties of the influencing mind. Ibn Rushd, the last great philosophical name in the medieval tradition of Muslim philosophy, did not formulate his thought systematically, but chose to write commentaries on Aristotle's works. Journal of the American Oriental Society This is because no subsequent philosopher of equal originality and acuteness produced a system after him. Dr. S. van den Bergh in his Averroes' Tahafut al- Tahafut, London, 1954 (Vol. The encouragement of basic research in the languages and literatures The scope of the Society's purpose is not limited Request Permissions, Read Online (Free) relies on page scans, which are not currently available to screen readers. But the nature of the first intelligence is no longer absolutely simple since, not being necessary-by-itself, it is only possible, and its possibility has been actualized by God. However, the technical revelation, in order to obtain the necessary quality of potency, also inevitably suffers from the fact that it does not present the naked truth but truth in the garb of symbols. Now, this simple, total insight (the scientia simplex of the medieval Latin scholastics comes from Ibn Sina) is the creative reason (or the active intellect); the formulated and elaborate form is the psychic knowledge, not the absolutely intellectual cognition. This ascendancy has been possible, however, not merely because he had a system but because that system had features of remarkable originality displaying a type of genius-like spirit in discovering methods and arguments whereby he sought to reformulate the purely rational and intellectual tradition of Hellenism, to which he was an eminent heir, for and, to an extent, within the religious system of Islam. If the problem could be solved by a simple inspection of the self in this manner, nothing would be easier. 5 of this chapter. Hence it is also called the Giver of Forms (the dator formarum of the subsequent medieval Western scholastics). The second difficulty arises from the fact that, although Aristotle generally holds that the definition or essence of a thing is its form, he nevertheless says in certain important passages (e.g., De Anima, Vol. Early Caliphate and its Characteristic Features, Abu Hanifahs Pronouncements and Opinions, The Problem of Sovereignty and Legislation, The Exchequer and the Publics Right of Ownership, Separation of the Judiciary from the Executive, Freedom of Expression: A Right and a Duty, The Question of Rebellion against Tyrannical Rule, Private Council and Codification of Islamic Law, Reversion to the Right-guided Caliphate, E. Characteristics Of The Chief Of The Ideal State, Chapter 37: Political Theory Of The Shiites, A History of Muslim Philosophy Volume 1, Book 3. This is because he pictures to himself a (possible) fall so vividly that the natural power of his limbs accords with it (Psychology, IV, 4). This is responsible for several subjectivist statements in Ibn Sina, who comes to distinguish between primary and secondary perceptions: the primary perception being subjective or of the state of the percipient's own mind, the secondary perception being that of the external world. But when the particular eclipse actually occurs in time, God, not being subject to temporal change, cannot know it. been humanistic. The most fundamental characteristic of Ibn Sina's thought is that of arriving at definitions by a severely rigorous method of division and distinction of concepts. Corrections? Religious Experience and Moral and Intellectual Values, A. Let us also suppose that he cannot see his own body and that the organs of his body are prevented from touching one another, so that he has no sense-perception whatsoever. The immateriality of the intellect is proved by Ibn Sina in an unprecedented, elaborate, and scholastic manner, the basic idea being that ideas or forms, being indivisible, cannot be said to be localized in any material organ. Our newer consideration shows that it can transcend its own body to affect others. According to the philosophical tradition of Hellenism, God, at best, can know only the essences (or universals) and not the particular existents, since these latter can be known only through sense-perception and, therefore, in time; but God, being supra-temporal and changeless and, further, incorporeal, cannot have perceptual knowledge. We see here the double purpose of the doctrine of essence and existence. Besides the works meptioned in the body of this chapter, and the bibliography given by Father Anawati, an account of the works on Ibn Sins between 1945 and 1952 will be found in the Philosophical Quarterly, 1953, Philosophical Surveys, Vol. In Ibn Sina, however, although the element of consciousness is present since one can affirm one's own existence, it is nevertheless present only as a way of locating the self: it is a contingent fact and not a logical necessity. Secondly, it also operates at a quasi-empirical level (Psychology, IV, 3). Al-Ghazl (a Muslim theologian of the 11th century) refuted the fay theory on the grounds that it lowers Gods role in the creation to mere natural causality. But he has added quite new and original interpretations of his own. and the American Antiquarian Society (1812). But this is the very doctrine which Ibn Sina ridicules. Indeed, his doctrine of the internal senses has no precedent in the history of philosophy. It should also be borne in mind that existence is not really a constituent element of things besides matter and form; it is rather a relation to God: if you view a thing in relation to the divine existentializing agency, it exists, and it exists necessarily and, further, its existence is intelligible, but when out of relation with God, its existence loses its intelligibility and meaning. And, indeed, Ibn Sina's system, taken as a whole, is such that it is his, bearing the unmistakable impress of his personality. The fifth internal sense conserves in memory those notions which are called by him intentions (ma'ani). But in the philosophical account of God there is just no room for this additional factor either at the end or at the beginning.
From the beginning its aims have Even though a1-Ghazali's criticism which assimilates the divine activity of Ibn Sina to the automatic procession of light from the sun and, thus, rejects the appellation of act to God's behaviour, is not quite correct (since according to Ibn Sina, God is not only conscious of the procession of the world from Him, but is also satisfied with and willing to it), the term creation is nevertheless used only in a Pickwickian sense, and the term act (in the sense of voluntary action) is also seriously modified, since as we have said, there is no question of real choice. But it is in his account of the intellectual operation and the manner of the acquisition of knowledge that the most original aspect of his doctrine of the intellect lies. The doctrine of wahm is the most original element in Ibn Sina's psychological teaching and comes very close to what some modern psychologists have described as the nervous response of the subject to a given object. include such subjects as philology, literary criticism, textual criticism, paleography, Hence he holds (K. al-Shifa', Isagoge to Logic, Cairo, 1952, pp. But although the intellectual-spiritual insight is the highest gift the prophet possesses, he cannot creatively act in history merely on the strength of that insight.
Ibn Sina's aswer to this objection is: Whenever I present bodily attributes to this something which is the source of my mental functions, I find that it cannot accept these attributes, and thus this incorporeal entity must be the soul. The fallacy of this answer consists in assimilating the past to the future, for the past is something actual in the sense that it has happened and is, therefore, determinate one and for all. The necessity of the phenomenon of prophethood and of divine revelation is something which Ibn Sina has sought to establish at four levels: the intellectual, the imaginative, the miraculous, and the socio-political. This symbolization and suggestiveness, when it works upon the spirit and the intellect of the prophet, results in so strong and vivid images that what the prophet's spirit thinks and conceives, he actually comes to hear and see. His theory of Being has led to the dependence of every finite being, on God; and his doctrines of mind-body relationship and of the genesis and nature of knowledge have both culminated in the religious conception of miracles in the one case, and of a creative revelatory knowledge in the other. It is a primary fact of experience that each individual is conscious of his self-identity which cannot be shaken by any kind of argument. When we are hungry or thirsty, our imagination puts bej'ore us lively images of food and drink. We are, indeed, often not aware as to what it is we want to know, let alone go ahead and know it. A theory of knowledge which fails to notice this fundamental truth is not only wrong but blasphemous. Post, I, Chap. In the external world the essence does not exist except in a kind of metaphorical sense, i, e., in the sense in which a number of objects allow themselves to be treated as being identical. Universality occurs to it in our minds only, and Ibn Sina takes a strictly functional view of the universals: our mind abstracts universals or general concepts whereby it is enabled to treat the world of infinite diversity in a summary and scientific manner by relating an identical mental construction to a number of objects. Ibn Sina also divides the internal perception formally into five faculties, although he shows a great deal of hesitation on the subject (see Psychology, IV, I). The ordinary human thinking mind, says Ibn Sina, is like a mirror upon which there is a succession of ideas reflected from the active intellect. The form existing in the soul is the cause of what occurs in matter (Psychology, IV, 4). One appeals to direct self-consciousness, the other seeks to prove the immateriality of the intellect. According to Ibn Sina, essences exist in God's mind (and in the mind of the active intelligences) prior to the individual existents exemplifying them in the external world and they also exist in our minds posterior to these individual existents.