[P170]

Falsafah and the problem of spiritual experience: Ibn-Sina

The ending of the High Caliphal state was perhaps more significant for the more strictly 'philosophical' side of Falsafah, in which the total sense of the cosmos and of the place of human beings in it was being assessed, than for more positive scientific inquiries. Here also the great synthesis of al-Farabi made it more possible to see where the gaps were. But the times themselves raised new questions. In an age when the caliphal state no longer seemed to offer the option of a philosophically ordered society, and when a Shari'ah-minded Islam was enforcing its norms on all, the personal and social mission of Falsafah had to be envisaged anew, and in particular its relation to the ruling popular religion.

The most intriguing attempt at this, done in the years following 983 CE, was that of the Ikhwan al-?afa', the 'Pure Brethren'. They formed a fellowship of men at Ba?rah and probably another at Baghdad, dedicated to enlightening and spiritually purifying themselves and to propagating their ideas in the various towns of Islamdom, quietly winning as much of the population as possible to ways of truth and purity and so raising the level of society. They produced an encyclopedia of the sciences of rationalistic Philosophia as a handbook for this purpose. This encyclopedia, which is all that really remains of the association, shows that they were associated with the Ba?iniyyah among the Shi’is. (If it is true that the Faylasuf Abu-Sulayman al-Sijistani was one of the brethren, as we are told, then they did not insist exclusively on a Ba?ini approach.) The encyclopedia looks to an imamate that should represent divine cosmic rationality among mankind, and delights in finding hidden symbolisms in Qur’an and Shari‘ah. But its teaching was more explicitly Falsafah than that of the great Isma‘ili da‘is in Egypt, whose political leadership the brethren, or some of them, may have respected. It presented in an essentiall3F independent way, without pre-commitment to any sectarian organization, the myth of the microcosmic return (more or less as it had been developed among the neo-Platonists, but Islamicized): that is, the idea that the world in all its complexity emanated from the ultimate One, which was expressed in cosmic Reason; and that all this complexity was resumed in human beings as microcosms, who by purifying their individual reasoning powers could reascend in intellectual contemplation to the original One.

The Ikhwan al-?afa’ suggest an exciting vista. To the extent that the group represented Isma‘ili inspiration, it apparently meant a new departure in Isma‘ili idealism. They clearly had more than personal aims: they wanted to leaven Muslim society in a new way by transforming the lives of individuals. What was distinctive in their effort was the idea of mutual enlightenment [p171] and support in little groups of studious friends everywhere, evidently without insistence on doctrinaire uniformity. Nothing much seems to have come of this project. The encyclopedia did become very popular, and continued so till the end of Islamicate civilization, popularizing one aspect of Falsafah culture. But even it did not lead into further intellectual or spiritual developments. It was not intellectually well disciplined. There was little trace of the work of al-Farabi here; the ideas mostly derived from a wide range of Hellenistic schools, without rigorous integration. Hence the problems raised were not sharply posed.

The Ikhwan al-?afa’ point up, by contrast, the strength of the work of the greatest Philosopher of the time, Abu-‘Ali Ibn-Sina (called, in Latin, Avi­cenna; 980-1037), during whose childhood they were at work. Ibn-Sina did build upon al-Farabi (and upon Aristotle as al-Farabi had made him known). In doing so, he also found that in the post-High Caliphal age, Falsafah was not accounting for political and social, and even personal, reality unless it made sense more explicitly than had al-Farabi (his chosen guide to Aristotle) of religion-in particular of the Shari‘ah; and then of the religious experience which went with it. But he rejected the Ba?ini path which had interested his family. And his work proved capable of opening up great new intellectual resources-though not of transforming society.

Ibn-Sina was born near Bukhara (in a Shi‘i family of officials), and learned all he could as a youth in the Samani court libraries. He tells us that by the age of eighteen he had devoured libraries in his reading and had acquired all the book-learning he was to have, at least in the various disciplines of Falsafah. He was already practicing medicine with success. He madea point of entering the service of munificent courts, but he did not want to go to Ghaznah, and when al-Biruni and others were taken off by Ma?mud, Ibn-Sina took refuge from, Ma?mud’s importunities at ever more distant courts in western Iran. There he became vizier for the most successful of the later Buyid rulers, going with him on his campaigns. In the midst of all this, he found time to compose both numerous small treatises and two great encyclopedic works in his two favourite fields, medicine and metaphysics.

Al-Farabi had attempted to account for Islamic revelation and its Shad' ah law in rationalistic terms, yet like al-Razi he was still relatively independent of Islam as an intellectual force. With time, such aloofness became less feasible. In his metaphysics, Ibn-Sina was the harbinger of a Falsafah that would be more closely integrated with the Islamic tradition as such. Ac­knowledging the importance of the Shari‘ah as it had been developed, he took far more pains than had al-Farabi to justify not merely the general principle of the need for a prophetic legislator but in particular the revealed legislation ascribed to Mu?ammad. He expounded elaborately the social usefulness of the various Shar‘i rules for the masses and even for the élite­with the understanding, in the latter case, that the 'philosopher' as sage could dispense with details for overriding reasons. Thus he defended the [p172]usefulness of ?alat worship as a discipline of the attention even for the ‘philosopher’, but he allowed himself wine on the ground that he found it helpful and knew how to avoid excess-the danger of which among the masses had been the ground for the Prophetic ban of it.

But he was also concerned with the psychology of revelation itself. Al­FArabi had left prophecy to the imaginative faculty, which rationalistic Philosophers did not take very seriously as compared to the rational. Ibn­Sina presented an analysis in which being a prophet would seem to pre­suppose being an ideal 'philosopher' too and having even fuller access to truth than the best 'philosopher' who remained on the level of discursive reasoning. He came to this by way of accounting for the mystical experience of the Sufis, with whose spiritual experience he had to come to terms in any case. Making use of the neo-Platonist system of logico-rational emanations from the One down to the world of compound beings, he explained that it was possible for the soul to have immediate intuitions of the cosmic Active Intellect governing events of this world, more immediate than those percep­tions to be gained by deductive demonstration. The evidence, in effect, was the ability of Sufis to arrive at certain insights in which they got beyond conventional presuppositions and came to what had to be admitted was a philosophic point of view without the use of syllogism and rational category. These intuitions could be translated into images by the imaginative faculty, and so presented to others by either Sufis or prophets. The prophet was he who was perfected in this way in the highest degree.

In the course of this analysis, Ibn-Sina was led to invoke a psychology that proved congenial to later Sufis themselves. He asserted that the human mind was not reasonable simply by participation in the universal Active Intellect, as al-FarAbi had held; that is, by its effective recognition of the rational universals underlying all transient appearances, a recognition which 'actualized' the potential intellect in each individual. Ibn-Sina insisted that the potential intellect in each individual was a distinct individual entity; it was immaterial and hence rational and indestructible, no matter how inadequately it had been 'actualized'. He supported this thinking in two ways. He cited such phenomena as autosuggestion and hypnotism and interpreted them as showing the direct action of the soul on its own body and on others, rather than as showing the intervention of disembodied spirits, as some in the Hellenic tradition had done; and he made unpreceden­tedly persistent use of the principle that distinguishable concepts must answer to distinguishable entities-a principle implicit in the faith of the Hellenic Philosophic tradition that human reason must find its analogue and its fulfillment in cosmic harmonies. By means of such practical evidence and of such normative principles, he established the independence of the soul from the body as a separate substance-differing here not only from Aristotle but also from Plotinus. This principle allowed for an individual survival after death (as against merely a general 'survival' in the ever-present Active [p173] Intellect) and permitted an otherwise essentially Aristotelian system to accommodate itself to the Muslim (and Platonic) doctrines of the afterlife by spiritualizing it. But it also helped more speculative Sufis to make more sense of their own experiences of a self which remained their own distinct self and yet was somehow beyond the world of time-and-space limitations.

Such an approach was supported with a comprehensive reinterpretation of every relevant point in the Philosophic system, from the process of intellec­tion to the nature of existence. The reinterpretation was focused in the doctrine of God. God was made to remain a simple being, as was required by rationalistic Philosophy; yet that being was assigned traits more consistent with an actual object of human worship. A careful analysis of the primary divine attributes showed that, if one used the proper logical distinctions, they could all be retained as identical with the divine essence (as Necessary Being). And it could even be shown that the ultimate simple God of universal rationality could be expected to 'know' not merely universal essences as potentialities in His rationality (as Philosophers had generally supposed), but even particular individuals or events-though only 'in a universal way', as a particular eclipse must be 'known' implicitly if one knows all the celestial essences and their possibilities of combination and interaction. It was in pursuit of such analyses that Ibn-Sina developed his complex doctrine of existence (wujud), set over against essence. Taking Aristotle's logical distinc­tion between what a thing is and the fact that it is, he assigned the distinction an ontological role: existence is something superadded to an essence, by which it can be asserted. The import of this ontological role emerges strikingly in a derivative distinction, that between necessary and merely possible existence, which for Ibn-Sina marks the difference between God and the creation; for by making God's existence be of a radically different sort than any other, this distinction sets God off as more than merely one point in the total system of nature, as He can seem to be for Aristotle.

The most impressive achievement of Ibn-Sina was to make the system of Aristotle more serviceable both for the understanding and for the disciplining of religious experience. But it seems to me that this was not so much by way of adapting it to Islam, as by way of making use of the metaphysically solid work of Aristotle to support the life-orientational dimension of the Philo­sophic tradition itself-the religiousness in it that had already been promi­nent in Socrates and Plato and that was less congenial to Aristotle. He was doing more soundly what the sort of Philosophers that the Ikhwan al-Safa were following had done less soundly for want of an adequate reckoning with Aristotle. He did. this, in part by invoking some of the religious values of the Abrahamic prophetic tradition as represented in Islam, and notably its stress on divine transcendence. To this degree, his was a real synthesis between the two life-orientational traditions, in both of which he seriously participated. But the Philosophic life-orientation tradition remained pri­mary: he continued to find ultimacy rather in the rational harmonies of a [p174] universal nature taken as normative than in the challenging historical events the Abrahamic communities took as revelatory. Thus the mission of Muhammad remained for him primarily a political event, wfth little ultimately orientational significance for the true 'philosopher'; and he denied any future moment of bodily resurrection-save in his works for the general public, where belief in such resurrection was recommended only as a point of 'faith', that is, of religious allegiance. Most of his adaptation to Islam, in fact, continued to be just what was called for when one envisaged Islam as a legitimate political and social order.

Thus Ibn-Sina went further than al-Farabi in recognizing the institutional religious tradition in two ways: by granting a somewhat more dignified role to the Islamic revelation in particular; and by allowing more philosophical space to the sense of ultimate relation between person and cosmos which marks religious traditions generally-including the more religious aspects of the Philosophic tradition. Accordingly, Ibn-Sinn's philosophy, unlike al-Farabi s, became the starting point for schools of speculation in which the values associated with Sufi mystical experience were primary. The Sufi study of the unconscious self eventually came to presuppose the terminology of Ibn-Sina"

Later, Ibn-Sina became a bone of contention. The strictest Peripatetics, notably Ibn-Rushd, quarrelled with him on points of logic as of metaphysics, preferring to hold by al-Farabi.' But not only the Sufis but also many later men of kalam disputation founded their philosophy upon him, and he became the starting point of the greater part of later Islamicate rational speculation. The attitude among later Sufis to Ibn-Sinn's work is summed up in a surely apocryphal anecdote: Ibn-Sina and a great Sufi met and talked together for a long time; when they emerged, Ibn-Sina reported of the conversation, 'All that I know, he sees'; and the Sufi reported, 'All that I see, he knows'. To what extent Ibn-Sina himself would have welcomed the constructions later put on his work by the more mystically inclined is not clear."

[Note: ] 8 The later commentators of Ibn-Sina interpreted him, accordingly, in ?ufi terms. It is not entirely clear how far this was justified by Ibn-Sna's own thought. Henry Corbin, in Avicenne et le récit visionnaire, vol. 1 (Tehran, 1954), maintains the ?ufi tradition. Anne-Marie Goichon, in Le récit de ?ayy ibn Yaq?an commenté par les textes d'Avicenne (Paris, 1959), contradicts him. At least on the level of the immediate meaning of the story in question, Goichon seems to have the better of the argument in insisting that it can be most unequivocally understood as remaining strictly within the Aristotelian tradition of Falsafah as enlarged by Ibn-Sina himself.

[note: ] 9 S. M. Stern gives an illuminating example of this Faylasiifs' dislike of Ibn-Sina in the physician (and travel writer) 'Abd-al-Latif: 'A Collection of Treatises by 'Abd al-Latif al-Baghdad , Islamic Studies, i (Karachi, 1962), 53-70. (Cf. for the same point, in the same journal, D. M. Dunlop, 'Averroes (Ibn Rushd) on the Modality of Propositions', pp. 23-34.)

[note: ] 10 The 'mashriqiyyah' wisdom, which Ibn-Sina refers to in some logical or metaphysi­cal connections but does not clearly expound, seems to be a key to part of this question. (The word is sometimes misrendered 'Oriental' philosophy, as if Ibn-Sina shared the notion that Greece was somehow 'Occidental' and Iran 'Oriental' and this should be reflected in philosophy.) The point at issue is his attitude to mysticism. It has been [continued on p175] [note 10 continued from p 174] extensively debated whether the term means 'eastern', in the sense of Khurasan or else Jundaysabur against Baghdad, or 'illuminative'. In the former case, it would refer merely to certain practices and logical teachings on which Peripatetic schools differed; in the latter case, it could refer to the mystical implications of certain ontological points which were undeniably included in its scope anyway. Cf. Carlo Nallino, 'Filosofia "orientate" od "illuminativa" d'Avicenna, Rivista di Studi Orientali, ro (1923-25). 433-67; Louis Gardet, La pensie religieuse d'Avicenne (Paris, 1951), P. 23; A. M. Goichon, Le récit de Hayy ibn Yaq?an, cited above; and Henry Corbin Oeuvres philosophiques et mystiques de Shihabaddin Yahya Sohrawardi, r (Tehran and Paris, 1952), Prolegomenes. Possibly Ibn-Sina intended a pun. Ibn-Sina's disciples certainly took it in the sense of 'illuminative', and supposed that he intended a mystical implication; but this may not have been in his mind.

Source: The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Volume 2: The Expansion of lslam in the Middle Periods. Marshall G. S. Hodgson. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago 1974. pp.170-174.

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