The Book:
Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays
Edited by Peter Adamson
Cambridge University Press
2013
The Talk:
Tenth Century Persian philosopher and physician Avicenna is considered to be the originator of the summa, a comprehensive outline of all knowledge. Many ancient writers wrote commentaries on authoritative texts, but few attempted to give their own account, their own complete, coherent take, on Everything, from logic to God to science to politics, etc. in a single work.
That takes some ego for sure, especially at a time when appealing to ancient authorities and asserting one’s academic pedigree was the source of one’s credibility. Avicenna was a bit of an outsider, self-taught and far away from Baghdad, the intellectual center of the Islamic world at the time. He spent his career in opposition to the Bagdad school, led mainly by Syrian Christian philosophers. And yet after his lifetime his ideas and his way of thinking spread throughout the Middle East and Europe, from India to Ireland. If you were a student at Oxford in the High Middle Ages, you were debating Avicenna.
Avicenna’s approach to thinking – combining reason with individual experience – culminated in two major works, one in philosophy and one in medicine, that shaped almost a millennia of philosophical thought and medical practice in the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian worlds.
In the 2013 book Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays, philosopher Peter Adamson collects together a series of contemporary scholarly essays on Avicenna in a way that provides a survey of Avicenna’s life and ideas, as well as an introduction to current academic conversations about Avicenna in the English-speaking world.
Avicenna’s rationalist empiricism
Dimitri Gutas describes Avicenna’s approach as “rationalist empiricism,” and I found it a helpful frame for wrapping my mind around Avicenna’s sprawling ideas.
For Avicenna, knowledge required two things: Logic and Mind.
Logic is the tool we use to figure out what is true or untrue, possible or impossible, necessarily so or not. Avicenna, following Aristotle, took the syllogism as the primary tool of logic. All thinking was explicitly—or implicitly—structured as a series of syllogisms.
Think of syllogisms as the “grammar of thought.” Everybody tacitly knows grammar, but they also don’t follow the “rules” well. By studying grammar, we can communicate more clearly. Avicenna might say that we are always thinking in syllogisms, but by making them explicit and working carefully, we can think more clearly and effectively.
And so, much of Avicenna’s writing is about getting the structure of premises and syllogisms right. Because if your tool is wrong, your beliefs will be wrong. But if your tool is sound, then everything that follows will be the truth.
But for Avicenna, logic alone is not enough. We also need a properly functioning mind to grasp and intuit the logic. Once you have the syllogism system worked out, you needed to strike upon the right premises to complete a syllogism in the right way. This requires a kind of wit or cleverness that reaches out and grasps the invisible structure of the logic.
As an autodidact, Avicenna recognized that he had a gift for quickly grasping logic. As a teacher, he realized other people didn’t—and they needed a lot of practice to follow the connections.
So psychology plays a role in knowledge. Knowledge is an experience that happens inside a mind, and so the qualities and health of a particular mind are an essential part of knowing.
The Cure and the Canon
Like a repeating fractal, the combination of logic and psychology seem to run through Avicenna’s work on many different levels.
For example, Avicenna wrote many, many works. But his two most monumental works were his 20-volume philosophical summa The Cure and his five-volume medical encyclopedia The Canon of Medicine.
Although Avicenna says in his autobiography that, having mastered medicine as a teenager, medicine was “easy,“ it clearly remained important to Avicenna philosophically. His summa is, of course, called The Cure, or The Healing. Avicenna writes about attaining knowledge: “The first learning is like the cure of an eye.”
His own philosophical project seems to require both the logic of The Cure and the health of the Canon in order to reach wisdom fully. The goal of medicine in Avicenna’s day was a balance of elements or humours. When this balance was achieved, a person was healthy, and that meant their soul/mind was healthy too. Only a balanced soul could properly intuit the right premises to complete the syllogisms to reach higher knowledge.
As mentioned earlier, the majority of The Cure was dedicated to the details of syllogisms. And the rest of the book applies that method to traditional Aristotelian subjects like poetics, rhetoric, politics, metaphysics, and the soul.
The Canon attempted to organize medicine into a rational system. The work is mainly theoretical, but Peter Pormann notes the places in which Avicenna brings experimentation and personal experience to bear. Medicine, ultimately, is an art that combines logic and personal experience.
The Floating Man
Avicenna’s philosophical approach expresses itself in one of his most famous thought experiments—The Floating (or Flying) Man. Avicenna invites the reader to imagine a person floating in space who has no sensory input. He essentially describes what we would today call a sensory-deprivation chamber.
Avicenna argues that such a floating person, lacking all external input, would still be able to conceive of themselves without needing to experience their body. And if something can be conceived without conceiving a part, then that part is not necessary to the thing being itself. Thus, the soul is independent of the body.
In this argument, the soul’s experience of itself becomes a ground for knowledge—a move that foreshadows Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” centuries later. (Descartes knew Avicenna in Latin translation.)
Certitude as self-experienced logic
In his work, Book of Salvation, Avicenna argues that self-knowledge is the basis of certitude.
Knowledge requires conceptualization and assent.
Conceptualization is a psychological act of imagination. And yet, though a properly functioning mind can conceptualize (imagine) many things, but it doesn’t know those things until it believes them to be true.
Assent occurs when the mind experiences the syllogism. Like when you conceive of 1+1=2. Your mind just believes it. (Alternatively: If the syllogism doesn’t work, you don’t have the assent, and so you don’t believe it, and therefore you don’t know it.)
Certitude—the sense of certainty of your knowledge—is a second order belief about one’s own belief. (I know X. I know that I know X. I know that I know that I know X. On to infinity.)
In this way, self-awareness (perceiving one’s own thinking) is a requirement for certainty. And for Avicenna this feeling of confidence is an essential element of attained knowledge.
In other words, you can feel certain about something and be wrong about it, but you can’t know something and not feel certain about it. If you know something, you feel confident that you know it. And that confidence is grounded in self-perception.
And thus knowledge of anything is wedded to self-knowledge.
Avicenna’s legacy
Gutas writes, “Perhaps the most telling indication of his success is that after him philosophers read no more Aristotle and Galen, but Avicenna.”
The final three chapters of the book are dedicated to outlining Avicenna’s reception in Islamic, Jewish, and Western Christian philosophy since his death in 1037 CE.
His medical influence is obvious. His Canon was the premier medical authority prior to modern medicine. (In recent years fragments of a medieval Irish translation of his work were found.)
His philosophical influence is more tricky to articulate. Many philosophers were often arguing against his views, which had become standard, on Avicenna’s own terms, so to speak. His definition of God as the “necessary existent” was influential in Western medieval philosophy. His views on essence and existence influenced modern philosophy. Along with Descartes, Spinoza and Bacon both knew Avicenna’s work in translation. And yet Avicenna was not often mentioned by name so his reception is mostly traced by inference.
If all philosophies are expressions of a philosopher’s personality, perhaps we can see in Avicenna’s themes something of the man: An introspective and self-confident person—confident in his ability to learn and know—who began not by passively transmitting a tradition but by engaging with it as a living individual.
In this way, he anticipates the modern world, in which education means not just parroting facts but wrestling with them. However, in another way, he is nothing like us. Today we live in a labyrinth of motivated reasoning, psychologizing, cognitive bias, and mental health crises. The psychological swamps the logical. Reason as the slave of the passions. We indulge ourselves with fantasies or paralyze ourselves with skepticism.
Where’s the cure?
Related:
What everybody gets wrong about Aristotle’s Poetics
Blurred lines: Sex, God, and poetry in the gardens of Shiraz
Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left (Amazon)
Ibn Sina's The Canon of Medicine (Sam Fogg Medieval Art)