A Bird in the Face

            On Tuesday morning I still hadn’t finished my third reading of Avicenna’s account of the soul so as to understand it well enough to answer and comment on one of the two questions about it posted by the TAs. I was worried about not getting it done in time before I left for class and yet in the back of my mind I was confident enough that I would get it done that I didn’t bother to cut any corners by taking time from my other regular activities. I decided that I would leave fifteen minutes later than usual if I had to since I’m always twenty minutes early anyway.

            I managed to get it done and write the paragraph:

           

Avicenna, through his “Flying Man” scenario is trying to show that the self exists independent of the body and that the body is merely a vehicle for the self or the soul. I don’t find his argument to be convincing. I have been in a sensory deprivation tank and have found that the removal from some of the senses does not take away awareness of the body because the body has a sense of itself. I argue that the self is actually a kind of culture created by the brain’s coordination of the senses. In the ultimate situation that Avicenna is aiming for in which the senses are entirely cut off from the mind, the self would not exist at all.

I only left ten minutes later than usual and arrived about ten minutes early for class. The lecture hall was almost empty anyway.

I asked Ryan if he’d made any notes of last Tuesday’s lecture. He said that he didn’t have much but he showed me what he’d put down in his little notebook. I was surprised to see that he prints his notes and asked him if it wasn’t a little slow the way he did it. He told me that he’d never really learned cursive writing. He said they touched on it a bit in grade school but never actually taught it. I was surprised. I asked him how old he was and he said 21. My daughter is almost 26 and I remember all of the endless cursive writing exercises she had to do of copying a printed phrase in longhand. I still have all of the notebooks. He expressed that he wished he’d learned it because it would have made note taking easier, but it didn’t happen. I asked the young woman next to him if it had been the same for her and she answered that it was. I found it interesting that they’d phased out longhand for their entire generation. I looked it up later and it seems that cursive was phased out in grade school shortly after my daughter learned it. I’m not saying it’s wrong to not teach it, but it is interesting.

Professor Black continued to talk about the Islamic medieval philosopher, Avicenna. His book, “The Salvation” is a reworking of his book, “The Cure”. He’s trying to prove the nature of god, and then show the consequences for the human soul and the implications for immortality.

She suggested that his Flying Man thought experiment makes some fallacious deductions, but it’s meant to alert and to point.

The deep primitive is always there with a sense of our selves.

Avicenna tries to prove that the human soul (rational soul) is independent of the body. Under what conditions can the rational soul grasp universals? No physical organ can represent universals. The rational soul is only connected extrinsically to the body. It’s indivisible and infinite if we take the universal. It’s infinite because to know humanity is to know every human. The world is eternal so potentially there are infinite individuals. Abstracting material from universal (distinctions). The rational soul is not impressed on the body. Implying his theories of causality. Making sure that the soul is not an exception though it is an anomaly.

Humanity is our essence. In that sense we are one as a single species and concept, though we are numerically multiplied as individuals, differing by virtue of our matter. Spot and Fido differ by virtue of their matter but not their caninity. This is a basic Aristotelian view: A multiplicity of individuals in the same species comes about through matter. But species is one because its matter is one substance. Each angel though is a separate essence and species with separate pure minds. Michael and Gabriel differ as horseness differs from felinity. Avicenna says humans do not differ from one another as a species. He applies this to the creation of human souls and thinks that the mechanism is a kind of creation.

Creation is emanation or outpouring, always in self-contemplation, outpouring forms that give structure to the universe and the sub-lunar world. Angels act as intermediaries. This is a natural outpouring as angels spend their time contemplating god.

Physical things prepare matter for the appropriate form of individual. Essence prepared for by human procreation is of a higher nature. The Christians adopted some of this but for them god just creates souls. Avicenna says the soul needs a particular body that will receive appropriate essence. Whatever is created by procreation and emanation must conform to the nature of the soul. It’s not dependent on the body. The individual that is produced has capacities that transcend matter. We are not eternal but when individuated we have special characteristics. Experience continues to individuate us. Everyone has a distinct origin and self-awareness is each our own unique experience. We each have our own flying man. Self-awareness defines the existence of the human soul. We acquire different sets of intelligibles, different mental content and different moral dispositions. But he says he is not sure and is worried about the details. He still has to prove that the soul is incorruptible.

Avicenna rules out pre-existence of the soul, so there is no reincarnation. Al-Razi on the other hand believed in transmigration of the soul. It survives death and remains an individual. Avicenna is the only Islamic Aristotelian who upholds personal immortality but he doesn’t think there is bodily resurrection or a corporeal afterlife. But maybe separate intellects could be rewarded or punished by latching onto a sphere.

This poses a problem if the world is eternal. We have an infinite number of souls populating the universe and ever increasing. He tries to fix this by saying that it’s not a vicious infinity.

A rational soul might be corruptible. Only the rational soul has operations independent of the body. If the body was the cause of the soul then it would die when the body does. The body is not the intrinsic cause of the soul. The soul is to the body what form is to matter. In humans the body is the occasion of the soul but not the cause.

The four causes are:

Matter

Form

Agent/Efficient (Separate causes and parents)

The soul itself.

The set-up has looseness about it but he thinks he’s shown that the rational soul is independent. The rational soul is incorruptible because to be corruptible it would have to be composite.

In closing she urged us to go, “Go and perfect your intellect and you will be happy this afternoon.”

After class, since I was down to the last five pages of my lecture notebook, I went to Staples. Since I couldn’t find another pretty purple one like the one that was almost full, I just picked the cheapest, which was a dollar and I bought an extra to take notes at Shab-e She’r. I also bought a weekly planner for 2018.

I was about 15 minutes early for tutorial so I sat and did some reading. James came about five minutes later, and I asked him if he ever takes notes in class. He said he doesn’t now that he’s in third year because everything is pretty much review, but he did in first and second year. I inquired as to whether he used cursive or not and he said he used cursive. He told me that he’d overheard my conversation with Ryan and offered the explanation that teachers don’t want to try to read in-class essays written in long hand and so it’s not something students are encouraged to learn.

Our tutorial was on the subject of Avicenna’s ideas about the soul. For him the mind and soul are the same. He reasons through a difficult process of elimination.

If we were brain dead we would still be self-aware.

Does the soul exist before the body? If so we are either many individual souls or we all make up one human soul.

If we are many different souls:

they either are a quiddity (kind) But humans are the same kind so no.

or accidents such as being in a different place and a different size depend on matter.

            If we are one soul:

            we either all have part of one soul, which would mean the soul is divisible and then we would have a quantitative extension but the soul is immaterial so no.

            or we are all individuals sharing one common soul, but then all minds would be identical and we could read each other’s thoughts like the Borg.

            So the soul must not exist before the body.

            Avicenna says that there are other intellects of ten different species. We are different by our mental content.

            Medievals, including the Islamic philosophers, didn’t think that life began at conception. It started when the mother could feel the baby moving inside of her.

            Does the soul die with the body? If so the case would be either:

            essential coexistence between the soul and the body and they would die together. This would contrast with co-essential coexistence, in which there would be no connection.

            or the soul would be prior to the body, not temporally but essentially, in which case the body would die if the soul dies. But the body dies of conditions that don’t affect the soul.

            Or the soul is posterior to the body. The body can’t cause the soul.

            Only god can kill the soul.

            Are the body and soul identical? It would be like saying clay and cat-shaped are identical. They must be two different features of the same but the soul is simple so it can’t be mortal.

            I asked her, “How can the soul be simple and be the mind at the same time?”

            She was puzzled by that one and said she’d get back to me.

            After class I was riding west on Queen with a strong wind blowing against me when suddenly a pigeon that was flying down from the upper right was trying to cross in front of me when the wind blew it off course and slammed it sideways into my face. It was like being slapped rather than punched very hard by a human but full onto the face instead of from one side or the other like the traditional slap. It really hurt! My lips were numb from the impact. When I got home I went straight to the mirror and was surprised to not see a mark.