Ep. 267: Avicenna on God and Soul w/ Peter Adamson (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set out to do philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 267 are what can we prove about God and the soul? And we're reading selections and commentary about these topics from Avicenna's three major synoptic works, all from the early 11th century A.D. the healing, the Salvation, and Remarks and Admonitions. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer above Completeness in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey building my sensory deprivation tank in the basement in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:42 Peter: And I'm Peter Adamson, who is excited to be on the show, dialing in from Munich, Germany.

0:49 Mark: Thank you, Peter. You're the man for this topic. You were saying this was your favorite in all the history of philosophy, Am I right? This is your favorite thing?

0:56 Peter: That's what I usually say. I'm not sure I actually have a favorite. Beyond whatever I'm covering from my own podcast at the moment is my favorite thing.

1:05 Dylan: That's a great position to be in.

1:06 Mark: Yep.

1:06 Peter: Yeah. If you have the misfortune to run into me and start talking to me about philosophy, I will inevitably turn the conversation towards whatever I'm just working on. So I'm not sure it actually is true. That is my favorite. But he's what I usually say if I'm forced to give an answer to the question just because he's so amazing and he's also so influential.

1:26 Mark: Yes. You are good enough to put these readings in front of us from a class that you taught, is that right?

1:30 Peter: I think some of them are from a class that I taught, at least. Yeah.

1:33 Mark: Okay. So the division between primary and secondary sources, for Avicenna, at least from an introductory point of view, is tricky because, as I was saying in the intro that there are three synoptic works. Right. That he wrote about everything in this first thing called the Healing, or what you call the cure, and then rewrote it shorter as the Salvation. And then this remarks and admonitions document is a later thing with very cryptic little student exercises to remind you of these things he's already taught you. But all three of these. Right. Go through a lot of stuff. Go through physics, go through ethics, go through metaphysics, go through mathematics, et cetera.

2:12 Peter: That's right. Yeah. You can think of what he's doing as an attempt to rewrite and restructure and rethink Aristotelian philosophy. He's coming after, let's say, a couple hundred years, a little bit more than that of reflection on Aristotelian and Platonist philosophy once it's been translated into Arabic. So his goal is to re evaluate all of that and pass judgment on it and reorganize it as well. And then there's another thing going on at the same time, which is that he's thought a lot about different ways of writing about philosophy to help students and readers of different levels, maybe. So the three works that you mentioned there in Arabic are called al-Shifa, al-Najat and al-Isharat wa'l-Tanbihat, which respectively mean the healing, the salvation. And I usually translate it as pointers and reminders. But you're right, sometimes people say remarks and admonitions.

3:06 Mark: Reminders is nicer than admonitions.

3:08 Peter: Yeah, and tanbihat really does mean to call something, it's in the plural. So reminders. The point of a tanbih is that you're calling something to mind that you're already maybe supposed to know, and that's why it's written in this cryptic, extremely compressed way. The idea would be maybe that you've taken classes with Avicenna, so this is for his circle, and he's giving you enough to remind you of how the argument goes, which means that if you weren't there in class, which we weren't, sadly, then you often struggle a little bit to see what's going on.

But actually, maybe surprisingly, that makes the Isharat wa'l-Tanbihat his most popular work later on, or at least his most commented upon work, precisely because it calls out for commentary. Or maybe there's a couple of reasons. One is that it's relatively short compared to the Healing, which is massive, massive work. I mean, it's many volumes in the modern printed edition, whereas the Isharat is a lot smaller because it's written in this really compressed way. And if we bear in mind that we're still talking about a culture here where everything is written out by hand, that's obviously a big advantage.

And in addition, there's the fact that it really needs commentary to be understood. And a combination of those two factors at least led to that being maybe his most widely read work in the later tradition, though I think we're still not totally sure about that because we don't have enough of a fix on all of the manuscripts and all of the commentaries and so on. But from what I've seen, it looks like it's the most read and certainly most commented upon work.

4:44 Mark: So for us to merely take, as we would normally do, a primary source. And we're just going to read that like, well, we're getting one version of this argument, and there are probably at least two others that would be useful to compare if we're going to get at this thing. So this is why I say that you sort of need secondary, at least somebody to collect the various bits that are giving this argument and put them together. So even this second primary source, which is one that I just found on the Web, to kind of expand on the stuff about the soul, it actually brings in even a third work anyway, we don't have to get into where all the little bits come from.

We might think that we could just read this primary source on the existence and properties of God. But then him arguing for the properties of God is over so many pages that your article from the Cambridge Avicenna Critical Essays from the Necessary Existence to God was absolutely necessary. It was not just a, you know, a commentary on this primary source about the existence of God that we read, but like a presentation of a lot of quotes from a lot of sources within the corpus to get us the gist of at least what some of these arguments for God's properties are.

Because that's going to be our big theme here with the God thing is it's not just. It's an argument for God's existence, but an argument that this thing that is the necessary being, as we'll say, actually is identifiable with the Islamic God, which, you know, is a lot of extra properties of goodness and intelligence. And all these things on top of just something has to be, you know, the terminus.

6:15 Peter: I think, for listeners who are more familiar with the European philosophical tradition, a good comparison here might actually be Kant, because there's a lot of Kant. I mean, there's the three Critiques, but then there's additionally all these other things that he wrote, like there's lectures. There's just way too much Kant. And similarly, there's a lot of Avicenna to read, and a lot of it's not translated either. So he's a difficult figure to read in that sense that it's just a challenge to get your head around all of it. I mean, I've been working on Avicenna for many years, and I haven't read every page of everything he wrote.

I mean, some of it's, like, really technical about mathematics and things like that, but still, it's just a formidable corpus. The other respect in which he's comparable to Kant is that he's similarly important he's the most influential and most important figure in the medieval tradition. If you think of medieval philosophy as everything that's happening between, let's say, I don't know, the 6th century and the 15th century to make a really big medieval period. And then you think of the philosophical traditions that are somehow stemming from ancient Greece.

So leaving India and China out of the picture just for the sake of this conversation, he's the most influential philosopher in that thousand year period. So he's more influential, for example, than Aquinas by a lot.

7:34 Dylan: I was going to sort of wonder about that because Aquinas is also one of these guys that has gigantic amounts of work, but maybe because of the secular turn or something like that. Is that the difference? Why Aquinas certainly isn't read the way Kant is anymore.

7:50 Peter: Yeah, one thing about Aquinas is that he's not as influential as you might expect in his own time and for like a hundred years afterwards. The fetishization of Aquinas, where he becomes the leading thinker of the Catholic Church, that's something that really starts to happen in the Renaissance. And in fact, at his own time, people probably wouldn't even have thought he was the most important scholastic philosopher in Paris in his generation, because they would have said, well, obviously Henry of Ghent, he's more important. So people are more excited about Henry of ghent for the 20 years or so after Aquinas's death than about Aquinas.

I mean, I'm not saying he was not important at all. He was definitely one of the significant theologians in Paris. So that's one thing. But the other thing is that Aquinas himself is very, very deeply influenced by Avicenna, quotes him all the time. So actually, the influence of Aquinas is always, among other things, a way of spreading the influence of Avicenna. And then Avicenna also is the dominant figure in subsequent Islamic philosophy. So his influence spans cultural divides in a way that no other medieval thinkers really does.

8:56 Dylan: You said something earlier which made me want to just sort of get a quick bit of history from you, because I don't know the Islamic tradition really at all. And just having you fill in a gap for me, which is you said that Avicenna was bringing together thinking and then building on it. That had been going on for a couple hundred years before then on Aristotle and Plato. And so maybe you could just fill in a sketch for me about what this path was. So we have the Greek literature ends up over in Baghdad, Middle East, Persia, and I know about it getting translated into Arabic and Persian and stuff. But there was, before Avicenna, a couple hundred years beforehand, was sort of the initial spate of people really coming to terms in that area with Platonic and Aristotelian thinking. Is that basically the story?

9:51 Peter: Yeah, that's right. I sometimes encourage people to think of philosophy in the Islamic world as divided into two parts of unequal sizes. So there's the first part where they're trying to come to grips directly with Greek philosophical texts and translation. And the two most famous people, at least from that period, are Al Kindi and Al Farabi. So they live respectively in the 9th and then into the first part of the 10th century CE. And then Avicenna is about 100 years after Al Farabi. And people often think, well, there's this kind of sequence of Aristotelian philosophers.

There's Al Kindi, Al Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, who lived in the 12th century. So you've sort of got one per century. It's very neat. And then their works get translated into Latin. But that's actually not a very good way to think about it because from the point of view of philosophy in the Islamic world, obviously they don't care what was translated into Latin. And from their point of view, especially in the larger part of the Islamic world, which is the east, so Central Asia and the modern day Middle east, you have a real shift where Aristotle stops being the most central figure everyone wants to respond to.

He's occasionally still read, obviously in translation, but mostly what they start doing is responding to Avicenna. And so you have generation after generation of theologian philosophers criticizing him, defending him, modifying him, even trying to do to him what he did to Aristotle. So there's a 12th century thinker named Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, who's also one of my favorite philosophers, and really no one's heard of him, who isn't a specialist in the field. But he's amazing, very much like Avicenna. He writes these huge systematic treatises covering everything that he thinks is worth covering.

And very ostentatiously tells you, well, here are all of the arguments on all of these topics, and here's what I think. Very much like Avicenna did to Aristotle. So he tries to kind of replace Avicenna without as much success as Avicenna had replacing Aristotle, but with some success. He's also a very influential thinker. But anyway, the upshot of this is that if you go way, way ahead down to, let's say, even philosophy in the 19th century, in Islamic India, and you crack open the books being written there, it's full of Avicennan argumentation and terminology.

It's absolutely amazing. So it's not like there's been no progress, obviously. It's actually kind of ironic because people often have this. There's a sort of myth of intellectual decline in the Islamic world, as if people stopped doing philosophy around the time of Averroes, which is an understandable misapprehension because that's when Arabic philosophy was translated into Latin. So Averroes is the last philosopher to be translated into Latin because he dies at the time of the Arabic Latin translation movement. But again, obviously, in the Islamic world, they don't care what's being translated into Latin.

So everyone who is living somewhere else, like out in the east or who comes later, they're not translated into Latin. And not only is there not a kind of intellectual collapse, but actually you have a very kind of continuous and stable intellectual tradition, in contrast to what happened in Europe, where you have the Renaissance, the challenges that were thrown against scholastic philosophy by the humanists. And then, of course, you have the Enlightenment. So actually, this whole idea that philosophy in the Islamic world kind of marched along really impressively for about 400 years and then collapsed and vanished.

Actually, that's more like what happened in Europe. That Aristotelian philosophy was marching along very nicely through the Middle Ages, and then it collapses in the 17th century to some extent. There is no collapse in the Islamic world that you can compare to that. I mean, the flip side of that, of course, is that, as people often notice, there's no Enlightenment either. So what we have is not an Aristotelian tradition, but an Avicennan tradition that keeps going along in Islamic theology and philosophy for a long, long time and really is only disrupted by the period of colonialism.

13:47 Mark: And I'm guessing we're the last generation that will call him Avicenna and call Averroes Averroes because it's Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, respectively. And just like we're now, you can't say Lao Tzu, It's Lao Tzu. That's the more approximately accurate transliteration. About half the things we read, we're calling him Ibn Sina, and some of them, it's just. It's been Avicenna in the Western texts for hundreds of years. So we're going to go with that for the moment. Whereas Al Farabi wasn't as big a name, did not get Latinized in that way.

14:23 Peter: Well, there's actually Al Farabius in Latin, and I've seen him call that in some secondary literature. But you're right. I'm actually writing a very short introduction to Ibn Sina for Oxford University Press later this year. And that's the title. So we actually talked about it and they in fact were in favor of having it be Ibn Sina rather than Avicenna, which surprised me because I always thought that you kind of need to stick with Avicenna for marketing reasons. But I think now we're probably going to go through a period where people call him Ibn Sina, parentheses, Avicenna, and then we call Averroes Ibn Rushd, parentheses, Averroes.

But it's sort of like calling Confucius Confucius. Right. So obviously it's not his Chinese name, but it's just a familiar name in English. I actually am less worked up about this than some people because my main concern is that everyone is reading these people and knows about them.

15:16 Dylan: Yeah. So you need the search terms, right?

15:18 Peter: Yeah, the search terms, exactly. Absolutely. That's actually a really good point. I mean, it sounds trivial, but it's really true. So if you publish something on Ibn Sina and people go online looking for Avicenna and they can't find what you published, that's obviously not productive.

15:32 Dylan: Yeah, you've been needlessly obscure and pedantic about something or precious about something. I'm in your camp. You can make the point, but also maintain the communication. The most important thing is to get people to be reading or engaging with the thing that they're trying to engage with.

15:48 Peter: I'm actually glad you brought it up. So my current policy is that I'm willing to call him Avicenna or Ibn Sina, depending on the context. But what I never do is call him Avicenna without mentioning that his real name is Ibn Sina.

15:58 Dylan: Sure, very good.

16:00 Mark: To the substance here. I kind of want to. Without diving into the deep weeds, which is very easy to do. I mean, even just reading one paragraph of this guy is pretty hard to read, even translated.

16:12 Dylan: It reminded me a lot of my early experiences trying to read some of the more off the beaten path Aristotle stuff. And it makes sense to me to hear that he cut his teeth on Aristotle and then built upon it, because there's that way of arguing and that way of talking, including the going through everyone else who had come before having chapter after chapter of sort of exhaustively going through what the arguments were and then saying, well, now here's the truth kind of thing. But it's Very, very dense when you

16:44 Mark: look at one of these terse things. The point of this, the articles here by Peter and by others that you provided was what is lurking behind these assumptions? Oh, well, we have to look back to the logic section. We have to look back to his psychology. We have to look back to other things to see why he would possibly be saying the things he's saying. So without disappearing into those we's, can we give like kind of a high overview of the two topics and how they're connecting that. You suggested these, Peter, because these seem to be. Because they do open that door to his whole metaphysics, his whole epistemology.

It's not just that we care about the existence of God and the existence of the soul. I mean, yes, this is what he's concerned about, but ultimately we want to get at what his metaphysics is, how it is a little different than Aristotle's, the assumptions for epistemology, for psychology, what it is that we. We just actually did a whole series on Locke, starting with a whole episode on his arguments against innate knowledge. So this is. You were saying on your own podcast, Peter, you think Locke spoke Arabic? Definitely read this guy.

17:42 Peter: Yeah, he might have known about him. And certainly, I think early modern philosophers in general, you can assume that if they haven't read Avicenna, then they have read things that are deeply influenced by Avicenna. For example, in Descartes, there's arguments that look like they're lifted straight from Avicenna in the Meditations.

17:59 Mark: So this argument for the existence of God seems like one that we've covered before, just because in our Existence of God episode, we did Aquinas and he kind of spits out six of them, and here's one of them, which is just that some things are necessary, some things are contingent. If something is contingent, it must have a necessary grounds. Well, that's going to end up being God. And so that doesn't sound a lot different than the cosmological. Everything has a cause. There must be some stopping point. Well, everything has a necessary ground. There must be some stopping point.

18:32 Dylan: Must be an unmoved mover.

18:34 Mark: Yeah, but as we look closely at that, we'll see that they're actually quite different in terms of the cosmological one at least seems to be looking out at the world like it looks like everything in the world has a cause. I mean, we can, we can be Kantians and say, no, actually we're imposing that causality on the world. But it still seems to be something that is roughly empirical. But if you just are thinking about necessity and contingency. I don't know if we see that in the world in the same way. That's more or less analyzing the definition. One of the whole articles by Deborah Black that you provided was just trying to pick apart the ontological, the definitional part of Avicenna's argument versus the cosmological, the more empirical part.

19:12 Peter: If we point to the kind of core intuitions of these two arguments, the cosmological one and Avicenna's one, the core intuition of the cosmological one is something along the lines of, okay, so what made these things happen that we can see? Whereas the core intuition of Avicenna's argument is, I think, well captured by the question, why is there something rather than nothing? Because you could look around yourself and even without anything moving or changing, you could think, well, gosh, I mean, it looks like this microphone and computer and these walls and et cetera.

Everything around me here, the trees outside, they could all not exist. So why do they exist? Maybe they just happen to exist. There's no explanation. But Avicenna has very strongly an intuition that we also associate with Leibniz that everything has to have a sufficient reason. So he would reject the idea that the world's existence or that the existence of things in the world could just be a brute, unexplained fact. He would say that that's philosophically unsatisfying. I think once we've talked about all this, if we come back at the end to whether this is going to be convincing, one of the easiest ways to avoid Avicenna's argument is to just reject the intuition and say, well, I don't think that the existence of things that may or may not have existed.

I don't think that that needs an explanation. It's just a brute fact. And he would say, well, that's crazy, but you don't have to have his intuition, right? I mean, I'm not saying that's the end of the conversation, but I think that's a very deep conflict between Avicenna and people who don't want the argument to work. People who don't want the argument to work are probably people who think that contingent things could just. Without there being any explanation for it. But what he thinks, as you said, is that if everything we can see around us is contingent, what that means is that in itself it would be open to either existing or not existing.

So I've got a coffee cup here. So my coffee cup is such, by its very nature or essence, as Avicenna would say, that it could either exist or not exist. And sometimes, in the tradition that is inspired by Avicenna, they talk a lot about things being preponderated to exist rather than not existing. So like a set of scales which is in balance, and something has to tip the scales in the direction of existing rather than not existing. And the way you kind of paraphrase the argument, it sounded like he immediately goes from the observation that some things are contingent to asserting that there's a necessary existence which is God.

But actually, that's skipping over a step because he admits that you might think that each contingent thing is caused by another contingent thing. So my coffee cup was made by whoever made the coffee cup, and whoever made the coffee cup was made by their parents, let's say, and their parents are made by their parents. And so you could have these chains of causes of existence as opposed to chains of causes of motion, which is what you get in the cosmological argument in Aristotle. And so the way Avicenna would respond to that is by saying, well, sure, you can have these chains of causes which are giving rise to existence, but don't think about that.

Think about all the contingent things taken together as one aggregate. In other words, the entire universe. Since everything in the entire universe is contingent, that means the universe is also contingent. Because if it's made of contingent parts, then the whole must also be contingent, and then that will need a cause. Why? Well, because everything contingent needs a cause. So like I said, here's where someone might object. Well, no, no, no. I think the universe is just here. There's no explanation for why it exists. It's just a brute fact. But then Avicenna would say, well, why is it that the coffee cup needs a cause of its existence and the universe doesn't?

That seems sort of ad hoc. And then you could have an argument about that, I suppose. But what Avicenna thinks is that it's actually part of the definition of. Or at least it's an immediate consequence of the definition of something's being contingent, that it needs a cause of its existence, because by its essence, by its nature, it could either exist or not exist. So it needs to be preponderated to exist. I mean, things don't just suddenly exist for no reason. That's the idea.

23:18 Mark: So once you get that argument to establish that there is a necessary being, then sort of the second part of the first half of our discussion here would be about, in this article that you wrote about deriving his various qualities and a lot of Those it just has to be, as in our Maimonides episode, negative theology. In other words, he's not contingent, so he can't be and he's not lacking anything. So there's a lot of things that like, he can't desire anything, he can't do a lot of the things that are associated with humanity. So then it becomes sort of a question, well, how could he even know something?

Because the way we know something is kind of by focusing our attention on it. This is a one phenomenal experience that we have of knowing something. There are lots of accounts we could give, but I focus my attention on it and I derive some conclusions and there's some processes that go on in our brains. But if God is going to be not lacking anything, then for instance, he can't learn anything, because then before he learned it, he would have not known it. He would have been lacking something. So he has to be outside time already knowing everything.

And so we have to come up with a new account of knowledge that's God's knowledge that he sort of knows it conceptually and, you know, the way that we would understand mathematical things, not the way we would become acquainted with a physical object in front of, in the way I was just describing. And so that's how he ends up knowing the entire chain of causation, of necessitation, that's how he knows the world is because he knows himself. And that ends up. Then to kind of jump us to the second topic a little bit, we want to figure out what human souls are.

And they end up having some surprisingly similar arguments for why they're immaterial, why they're singular, why they are ultimately immortal. And I think in part the way that we know things.

25:06 Peter: You're right that I mean self knowledge is going to be really core to his understanding of God and his understanding of the human soul, as we'll see. Just to spell out a little bit more slowly why God can't, for example, learn things. As you were just saying, there's actually a more general phenomenon here which is that God cannot change. So when he establishes that God exists, being a necessary existence, he takes that to mean that everything about God is necessary. And actually this becomes a really contentious point later on. So a lot of his critics say, well, sure, God exists necessarily, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing about God that is contingent, because maybe God has free will.

So maybe God decides, for example, to create the universe when he doesn't have to. Whereas Avicenna would say everything about God is Necessary. So the universe must come forth from him necessarily. And God can't change, because if he changes. So let's imagine, for example, he goes from not knowing that I'm drinking coffee out of my coffee cup to knowing that I'm drinking coffee out of my coffee cup. Well, that would mean that he's in a state where he could know that I'm drinking coffee, but he doesn't yet. And then this possibility would be realized for him once he learns it.

Also, he can't turn from red to blue. Because then he would at first be red, but possibly be blue, and then he'd be blue. And the whole point is that God can't have any unrealized possibilities because he's necessary through and through. Everything about him is necessary. So he cannot change. He can't have a body, because if he had a body, he would have parts. And if he had parts, then he would be a whole that is depending on his parts. So the parts would be a cause for him. And necessary things don't have causes. That's how he gets divine simplicity.

26:47 Dylan: For example, a lot of this just turns on what we understand necessity to be. And so I was struck again in reading through it, a way in which the parts about God or whatever are kind of dressed up extras for just the playing out of what is implied by a specific understanding of necessity.

27:09 Peter: That's absolutely right. Yeah. That's the core of his philosophical theology. In one sentence, what you just said. I mean, even to take another step back, the way that the text actually goes is he proves there's a necessary existence, and then he doesn't think he's done so. This is what Mark was referring to before, that I talked about in his article, that he needs to extract all of the traditional divine attributes that we expect to belong to God somehow out of this notion of necessity. So he's all powerful because he's necessary in himself and makes everything else to be necessary by reducing it from merely possible to being definitely existent by causing it to happen.

So he basically forces things to happen or forces the universe to exist, we might say makes it inevitable that the universe exists, even though in its own right it could either exist or not exist. Similarly, he has no parts. He's simple for the reason I just said. And in fact, a lot of what he's going to say about God is that a necessary being can have no cause. So that would be another reason, by the way, why I can't bring him to learn that I'm drinking coffee. If I taught him that I'm drinking coffee. By drinking coffee, then I would cause him to have knowledge.

And he can't have a cause because he's necessary. So he sort of rings the changes on this idea of necessity. And he ultimately wants to say that you can extract everything there is to be known about God out of the notion of necessity. Here someone might step in and say, hang on a second, what about the Quran? So don't we have this revelation that could teach us a whole bunch of other stuff about God that we didn't know otherwise? And he would say, no. So some people would, right. So in particular in the Christian tradition, we might think of Aquinas here again, Aquinas, but he's not alone in this, would say that given the natural resources of our own reasoning, we wouldn't, for example, be able to know that God is a trinity or that God was incarnated as Christ, let's say.

But Avicenna thinks that there's nothing we can know about God that we cannot know through reason. And everything we know about God through reason we know by grasping him as a necessary existent. And then if you ask him about the Quran, he'd say, well, yeah, that's what the Quran means. I just told you what the inner truth of the Quran, it's the stuff about God being a necessary exist. So when it says in the Quran that God created everything and is majestic and powerful, he would say, well, yeah, that's what that means. He's a necessary existent.

He makes everything exist by rendering it to be necessary. What's your problem? Right?

29:27 Dylan: Yeah, we were conflating already this necessary existent with there being a being. And I wanted to back up a little bit to that. Seems to me that there's a distinction there between the necessary existent. When we use the word being, we very quickly start talking about living things and thinking of them as we did the natural things. You know, talking about God and what is he like and what does he do and what kind of attributes does he have? I'm wondering a bit about that difference between an existent and a being, because I think that it seems to me that some of the work that Avicent is doing in seeing that, well, I have to go from a necessary existence to then talking about God. Part of that is maybe trying to bridge that gap between an existent and a being instead of being.

30:16 Mark: I think it's more quiddity. That's the same as essence, right, Peter?

30:20 Peter: Yeah, well, the Arabic word, or there's several of them, but his favorite word for this is mahia. Which roughly means what ness, which is what quiddity means in Latin. I mean, quidditas is what it means in Latin as well. I would keep those three things apart. So there's existent, there's being, and there's quiddity, or essence, because essence is really what something is, answering the question the what it is, exactly as in Aristotle. So for the sake of argument, we might say that the quiddity of human is to be a rational, living being or something like that.

Now, a being, actually, that English word does not have an obvious correlate in Avicenna's technical terminology. He's very focused on the notion of existence, which in Arabic is wujud. That actually literally means just the fact that something is found or something is available, and he can make the word maujud out of that, which means an existent. In other words, something that exists. And that's pretty close to the notion of a being. But maybe there's a slightly different connotation, because I think you might naturally suppose that an existent is just anything that has existence, whereas if you think of a being as something that has being, you might more naturally be led in the direction of thinking, okay, but what kind of being?

Because being a human being, a horse being, the color red, whereas there's no existing a human existing horse. And so actually, that right there is the difference between Aristotelian metaphysics and Avicennan metaphysics in a nutshell. So Aristotle doesn't have a general notion of existence such that he can say, well, there are humans and horses and giraffes and coffee cups, and they each have existence. They each have this same thing that comes to them from the outside, maybe from a cause, whatever caused them, namely, this thing existence. What he does instead is he says, well, there is something which it is to be a human, and there's something else which it is to be a horse.

And in some sense the horse is just identical with its act of being a horse. It is a being because it is a horse. He doesn't pull apart horseness, which is quiddity, from existence, in the way that Avicenna does. And this is the famous essence existence distinction which Aquinas again picks up. So the idea that Avicenna wants to really press on is that we can separate the question of what something is or what kind of thing something is, and that will tell us what its quiddity is from the question of whether it exists or not. And if it does exist, then it has existence.

And maybe it would only be if you put Those two things together that you would get the being because you'd get my coffee cup, which has the quiddity of a coffee cup. In other words, it satisfies whatever the definition of coffee cup is. And then, because that quiddity has received existence in the shape of my coffee cup, we have a being, which is the coffee cup. But he doesn't really do any work with a notion of being, whereas Aristotle only works with the notion of being. There we got pretty deep into the weeds.

33:13 Mark: Yeah, well, this is almost inescapable if we're going to. But this is all useful, and it's useful for then talking about the soul as well. Because with the soul, well, the soul is whatever it is that does these things in our minds, right? It perceives. There's a nutritive part of it. It's whatever makes us alive. And the human soul in particular makes us thinking. So you could say, well, that's just what the soul is. But according to Avicenna, well, that gives us. It does establish the existence of the soul. Absolutely. Just by empirical observation of external things.

Well, I guess observing your own thinking is not an external thing. But a lot of what human beings and even animals, we can for sure know that they have souls. But we don't know the essence. We don't know the quiddity. We don't know actually what a soul is. And so it actually becomes something very much like what I was saying. How God knows himself ends up how we know ourselves. That it's just direct, unmediated. You might think that the only reason that we know we have a mind at all is because consciousness has this intentional structure. It's aimed at something.

And this is Aristotle's position. So you kind of figure out that, okay, I'm thinking of dog. I'm thinking of the number 3. What is common to all those things? It's that there is some pull to the experience. A phenomenologist, Sartre particularly, just called it a pole within our experienced mental life. But if we didn't have those normal, everyday experiences of perceiving and remembering and imagining things, we would never get this idea. We would never have this idea of the self as being the thing that is containing or pointed at or a pole in this relationship between us and the outside world.

But Avicenna just denies that. And he does this with this flying man thought experiment, which is just imagine yourself just instantly created with no memory of your past life, full mental faculties. But you've never had an actual experience in the everyday sense. You don't have any sensation of your body. But he thinks you would still know that you're you, that you exist. And in fact, you would know the essence of you, just in the way God knows his own essence without having to go walking around in the world and coming to discover himself in a weird.

The kind of Hegelian God. We should have the same idea of ourself.

35:37 Peter: So the transition you just made is exactly the same one he does the first time he gives us the flying man argument. So we have, in the section of the Healing on the soul, the first chapter of the first treatise does what you just did. So he says, well, there's this way that Aristotle thinks about the soul. And for Aristotle, the soul is not merely the mind. In fact, it isn't mostly the mind. And it's not about consciousness or thinking in the first instance. Because for Aristotle, soul is supposed to explain everything that living organisms do.

So nutrition, digestion, reproduction, sensation, motion. And there are three different kinds of souls. You probably covered this on an old episode somewhere. So there's plant souls, there's animal souls, and there's human souls. But even human souls have all of the functions that plant and animal souls do, right? So humans have a lot in common with animals and plants. We have sensation and the capacity to move, the capacity to pursue prey the way that predatory animals do. So we have a lot in common with animals. We also have imagination and memory.

So do animals. Animals, according to Avicenna. And then we also have powers that belong to plants, like the ability to engage in nutrition and digestion, in fact. So most of what we can do through our souls is something that plants and animals can do. And that's already what Aristotle says, right? And then Aristotle says, oh, but there's this one other thing humans can do, only humans can do, which is to think. And that's something they do without using any bodily organ, he believes. Now, skipping over more than a thousand years of philosophy to get to Avicenna, Avicenna says, well, actually, I'm not very happy about the idea that this thing we're talking about is just a set of functions, most of which are exercised through the body.

Because the thing in itself is the immaterial thinking. In the case of a human, not in the case of a plant or an animal, obviously, but in the case of a human. What we're talking about, this substance we're interested in in this treatise that he's writing, is primarily a thinking thing, and it can survive without its body. So when you die, your powers of nutrition and digestion, reproduction and eyesight, all sensation, locomotion, all that goes out the window, and you're only left as a thinking being. And that's actually what the soul is in itself.

That's the substance we're interested in. And then he actually says, well, this word soul, in Arabic, the word is nafs. So this corresponds to Greek psyche, which is where we get the word psychology. This thing, if you want to call it soul, you're really talking about its relationship to the body. So the activities that it projects into the body when it uses the body as an instrument for exercising a wider range of activities. But in itself, the soul is doing nothing other than thinking. That is its function, that is its activity. It is just a thinking substance.

So it's a lot more like a Cartesian soul than an Aristotelian soul, if that helps your listeners. So then at the end of the chapter, he says, well, actually now I've just told you that this substance in its own right, is not really something whose activities can be observed through observing bodies. So you can look at plants and animals and see that they have souls because they're engaging in all of these organic processes like nutrition and sensation. But you can't actually empirically observe what the soul is doing in its own right. And then he says, fortunately, there's a way that we have access to the soul in itself, which is not through external observation, but is through grasping oneself.

And then he gives us the flying man argument. Just to go over the thought experiment one more time is basically what you said, but just because it's fun. His idea is God creates a human being with a body and everything, So a normal human being in midair. And he says that the person is veiled, so can't see anything, but it might be easier to just imagine that it's really dark and there's no sound and there's no air whistling by. So he's not falling quickly through the air because he or she would feel the wind. Limbs are splayed out, so there's no contact with anything.

By the way, that's why the person has to be flying or in midair, because if you were standing on the ground, you'd feel the floor, right? And also, as you said, he's just been created the person, so there's no memory. So the thought experiment is let's eliminate all of sensory input, sort of like the ultimate sensory deprivation tank. And let's also make the person just be created just now to eliminate any memories or anything that they could draw on in terms of imagining anything. So now the question is, would this person be a complete blank?

So you mentioned Locke before and Locke would say, yes, this person would be a complete blank. I guess Locke would say, I'm not a Locke expert, but I guess Locke would say this person would have no mental life whatsoever, Whereas Avicenna says, no, the person would grasp themselves so they would know that they exist. He thinks that that actually is a kind of permanent feature of human mental life which we're often unaware of, but we can always become aware of whenever we want. So you can always introspect and sort of think, oh, here I am. And this act of self awareness for him is our best route into grasping the substance of the soul in itself.

Whereas most of the time we're kind of distracted by being hungry or stubbing our toe or seeing a movie or whatever we're doing. And so we're only aware of the activities that the soul is exercising through the body. But if you want to become aware of yourself, of what you really are, then you can always do it very easily just by exercising this self awareness which is always available to you. So that's the point of the thought experiment.

41:25 Dylan: I really like the way you articulated it, Peter. And it raises the following contrast, especially with respect to what we were talking about earlier. So I think the blank in Locke, the way I would understand it, is that there is that potential that the human soul and that blankness in the Flying man argument would be that they're blank and ready for perception to generate drive content in the soul. So there's sort of this, for lack of a better term, this just sheer potentiality available, but that is not operating yet as a soul. And the big difference there is that Avicenna is essentially saying that the soul is self acting so that it's not merely potentiality, but activity itself.

And that's the mode in which it's become self aware, is that yes, it's going to be able to act on perception, it's going to be able to have perception come in and refine those and stuff like that. But the key thing is that the soul can act on itself absent anything else. Whereas I agree with you, Locke would say, no, the soul is a potential awaiting for that activity to then generate the full activity of a rational human being. So in that way the soul, I hadn't thought about this until we were just talking about the soul here. For Avicenna is like a self moved mover.

It's not its own cause exactly, but it's its own cause of its own manifestation. So that is the soul perceives itself through itself in its own self action. And saying it that way makes me then think that, well, okay, it's like the closest thing to God that you're going to have. Right?

43:03 Mark: Because it doesn't have parts. It's not like self consciousness normally is one part of you looking at another part of you or making an object out of itself. But no, this has to be somehow direct and unmediated. Very much not what our experience of knowledge actually is.

43:19 Peter: Yeah, so like God, it's partless and it's self grasping, self aware, self knowing. I mean, what you were saying about Locke actually sounds a lot like Aristotle too, right? That everything the soul can do is something it has the potentiality to do. For example, it has potential knowledge of various things which it can then actually realize.

43:36 Dylan: Yeah, and I have to be really careful. I don't think any Locke scholars actually listen to us. But I for sure I could easily just be projecting my Aristotle onto my Locke. So that could be possible.

43:48 Mark: I think you're right because as we were talking about that there's outer sense and inner sense for Locke, but both of them need materials that ultimately come from perception, so you just wouldn't get them otherwise.

43:58 Peter: At least I think the standard understanding of what it means to be an empiricist is that all knowledge comes through experience. Right. And Avicenna in the Flying man argument is directly denying this. I think that's clear.

44:11 Dylan: There's content to the idea that the soul experiences itself.

44:15 Peter: It depends a little bit what you mean by experience. If by experience we mean empirical sense experience, then the whole point of the Flying man is to set up a context in which there's someone who has no sense, experience or memory of sense experience, but there's still something they know, namely their own existence. By the way, one thing I would slowly. I mean, I don't want to disagree with anything you said, but I just want to put in a caveat, which is that I'm not sure Avicenna would want to say that self awareness is self action or self causation. Because for one thing, he certainly would not want to suggest that the soul brings itself into existence. Because then again, the soul would be a necessary existence.

44:55 Dylan: I would make the distinction between self acting versus self causing is the kind of thing that can act upon itself. And that would be something like, I don't know how else you'd understand self awareness that's not mediated by something. So I mean, to me, the Floating man argument is presenting you with a soul that is self aware that in an unmediated fashion. But that would be distinct from saying that the soul caused itself.

45:21 Peter: So first of all, we certainly want to avoid the idea that the soul makes itself exist. So we've clarified, we don't mean that. Whether the soul is acting upon itself by knowing itself is a really interesting question in the terminology that's being used here and even in English, actually. Obviously the verb to act is very closely related to the notion of actuality, whose complement is potentiality. So if you say that A acts upon B, that makes it sound like A has some potentiality to act upon B and realize a potentiality in it. And so in Arabic you would say yaf alu would be it acts or it acts upon.

And that would sort of naturally lead you to suspect that some kind of potentiality, which in Arabic is a kuwa, is being turned into a fa', l, which is an actuality or an act. And so I think Avicenna would probably not like this because he doesn't think that the soul is changing itself or realizing any potentiality in itself by grasping itself. So he's going to use words like awareness and knowledge rather than action kind of words. I think probably just to avoid that implication. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong. It just means that if we're talking about self, action or acting upon the self, it has to be in some way that avoids suggesting that the soul is changing itself or is realizing some potentiality that it formerly hadn't used.

He would want to avoid that at least.

46:47 Mark: Well, by saying that we necessarily know ourselves, we're putting forth a particular epistemology. Because for the empiricist paradigm, case of knowledge is a conscious experience of coming to acquaintance with something external to you, or maybe then thinking about that subsequently. But according to this, Avicenna acknowledges the phenomenology there in fact says we can only think of one thing in terms of have something in our conscious awareness that we're mulling over. We can only really do that with one thing at a time. So if we then have knowledge that is innate nonetheless, then it somehow has to be.

We're aware of it in some other way, that it is tacit knowledge. At least one of the articles that you provided ends up breaking this down is that, well, the thing that we are aware of actually has components that you could analyze out of it. And so one of these components is always the sense of self awareness. So it's like the sense of Self is a conceptual part of everything else that we would mull around in our mind. And so even though the conscious sense of knowledge, it seems like I'm just thinking about this math problem or I'm thinking about the book that's in front of me.

I'm in fact also implicitly thinking about the self because the self is a component of that perception.

48:01 Peter: Yeah. And I think that that actually is phenomenologically accurate. So if you imagine you're kind of lost in reading a book, so you're aware of the book. Because how could you be reading it if you weren't aware of it? I mean, I'm not talking about the case where your mind wanders, you're not paying any attention, so you're actually reading it attentively. So you're aware of the book. And then Avicenna would say, sure. But even though you're not explicitly thinking of yourself there as reading the book, you can effortlessly be aware of yourself reading the book.

The word tacit, which you just used, is a really good word. I use that a lot to explain what's going on here. And so your self awareness is always tacitly part of your awareness of any other object. And this is why I was saying that he wouldn't be happy with the idea that there was any change or actualization of a potentiality going on, because he thinks that you are always aware of yourself. It's just that most of the time you're only tacitly aware of yourself. And in fact, he even thinks this is kind of crazy, but he even thinks that you must be aware of yourself when you're asleep, or really stinking drunk, for example, or even if you pass out, you're aware of yourself the whole time.

You're just not actively aware of yourself. So your self awareness, in other words, is tacit rather than being salient or whatever you might want to call that. I don't think he has a really good argument for that, actually, apart from the idea that this must be so core to the identity and very being of yourself that if you ever stopped being self aware completely, you're not even tacitly self aware that you'd kind of vanish from existence, because this is the bedrock of all mental life for him.

49:34 Dylan: It makes me want to get Avicenna together with Buddha or something. Right.

49:38 Peter: Actually, amazingly, that didn't happen. But. So there's a story about him being confronted with the idea, the Buddhist idea, because of course, they knew about Buddhism in medieval Islam. There's a story about him being asked what he thinks about the Buddhist theory that there's no self that persists over time. And it's kind of a jokey anecdote about him where he just ignores the question and the student says, master. And Avicenna says, sorry, I only answer questions to the same person who posed them.

50:11 Mark: Nice.

50:12 Dylan: That's awesome.

50:14 Mark: Sartre also had that same idea that whenever we're focusing on some external matter, some focus to our consciousness of our intentionality, then there's also, as I was saying, this pole, it's like it's just a part. You just got to bend back and you'll see that right there is the sense of self that's lurking there. And of course, that's different than when you explicitly get self consciousness and start thinking about, what am I doing now? What am I thinking now? That is also there. But the idea of a whole being sort of a part is different than a conceptual component that you need to drill into.

And that of course, I mean, I guess this is a difficult thing for me to get past because if you say it's a conceptual part that you would have to then use intelligent analysis to drill into, well, but you don't need intelligent analysis. Like this is just part of your core being. And I found the idea of the stuff we've been saying about God very illuminating for the stuff we're saying about human knowledge. Because how does God know himself? Not through this episodic knowledge. He knows himself directly in the same way that we know ourselves. So that provides a model right there for if we want to say there's within, again, my experience of the book, if we break that down in some conceptual way, there's a me stuck in there that I'm the one reading the book, then, well, that's how God understands everything, right?

He doesn't have phenomenal experiences that he has to drill into. It's just by his very nature. He understands everything conceptually from this outside of time perspective. Which then made me think of like Mary in the black and white room, who's never seen colors, who's only read about them. So it seems like God is actually missing something that humans have by our very finitude.

52:00 Peter: Yeah. Avicenna would say what he's missing is an imperfection because he doesn't have sense perception. But you're better off not having sense perception. What you're saying points to the fact that Avicenna is taking a stand in what is actually a very long running debate about whether something that's completely simple can engage in self knowledge or any kind of self directed act, to go back to what we were talking about before in terms of acting on the self and so on. Because you might naturally think, well, if I'm going to think about myself, then there has to be two parts of me, namely the part that's doing the thinking and the part that's being thought about.

And to name an obvious case of someone who thought this, there's this philosopher named Plotinus, who's the founder of Neoplatonism, who lived in the third century, and he rejected Aristotle's teaching that God is a pure intellect on the ground that if the very first God is completely simple and has utter total unity, then the very first God cannot think about himself. Because if he were, then he'd have this subject object duality, right? There'd be the thinking aspect of him and the being thought about aspect of him, and so he'd be two instead of one.

Whereas Avicenna thinks that self directed thinking is compatible with simplicity and immateriality and so on. So all the things that you get in the case of both the soul and God. So the parallel you're drawing is very correct. I think that his idea that the soul grasps itself directly is actually his biggest move in the direction of saying that the soul is a lot like God, because the God is also this simple immaterial intellect who is thinking about himself all the time. We're also thinking about ourselves all the time in the sense of being aware of ourselves.

We don't get as much out of that as he does. When he thinks about himself. He knows himself as the cause of all things and therefore he indirectly knows everything, at least in the appropriate way, as you were just saying. Whereas really all we get out of self knowledge is, oh, here I am, I exist. So it's much thinner and almost content free, you might say, but at least gives us a strong similarity between the human intellect and God, because we have two things that are engaging in self directed thinking without that implying any kind of duality of two parts, one of which is thinking and one of which is being thought about.

But like I say, I mean, other philosophers had denied that this is possible because they said, well, as soon as you've got any kind of cognition, you're always going to have the thing engaging in the cognition and then the target or object of the cognition. And so you're always going to have some kind of minimal duality, at least a conceptual distinction between what thinks and what is thought about. And Avicenna says either he says, no, that's not right. Or he says, well, that kind of conceptual distinction isn't a problem. The only thing that would be a problem would be really actually distinct parts.

54:50 Mark: We're going to keep talking for another hour or so and really get into the weeds here. And you can go ahead and get part two. It's the next thing in your feedback.