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Risāla fī maʿrifat al-nafs al-nāṭiqa wa-aḥwālihā

(lit.: Treatise on Knowing the Rational Soul and Its States)

Ranks the souls of the dead by what they knew and how they lived, using the Qur'an's three companies of the last day.

by Avicenna15 passages held

  • Arabic, the original language
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Overview

Knowing the soul, this short epistle begins, is the road to knowing God, and it sets out to establish three things in three chapters. The first takes up the long disagreement over what a person means by I, argues that the self is the soul and not the body, and gives three proofs that the soul is not a body at all. The second argues that the soul survives the ruin of the body. The third sorts souls after death by the Qur'an's own division of humankind on the last day into those brought near to God, the companions of the right and the companions of the left. Souls perfect in both knowledge and action join the world of the intellects. Souls perfect in one but not the other join the heavenly spheres, and probably rise in the end to the highest rank. Souls lacking both fall into what the epistle calls the hell of the elemental bodies. An epilogue describes how intellects, souls and the heavenly bodies proceed from God. Whether Avicenna wrote it is disputed. The Egyptian editor Aḥmad Fuʾād al-Ahwānī printed it in Cairo in 1952 beside Avicenna's epistle On the States of the Soul, as one of three psychological texts he took to be Avicenna's. Jean Michot, the Belgian scholar who translated it into French in 1984, presented it as an epistle attributed to Avicenna.

Key concepts

What does the epistle mean by the soul?

The soul is whatever each person refers to when they say 'I'. The epistle's claim is that this is not the visible body but a substance of another kind, which uses the body as its instrument. So the question 'what is the soul?' becomes 'what am I?', and the answer decides whether anything of a person can outlast the body.

Who are those brought near, and the companions of the right and of the left?

They are the Qur'an's three companies of humankind on the last day, which the epistle reads as ranks of souls. Those brought near are perfect in both knowledge and action; the companions of the right are perfect in one of the two; the companions of the left lack both. Each rank's place after death follows from what the soul made of itself in life.

What does it mean to be perfect in knowledge and in action?

Perfection in knowledge means the soul has come to know the truth of things, above all God, the intellects and the order of the world. Perfection in action means its conduct is virtuous, its bodily desires governed rather than governing. The two can come apart, which is why the epistle needs a middle rank between the nearest souls and the lost.

What is the world of the intellects?

It is the highest level of existence below God, made of minds without bodies. The closing chapter describes it as the first link of a chain: from God comes an intellect, and from each intellect another intellect, a soul and a heavenly body, down to a tenth intellect, from which the world of the four elements arises. The most perfect souls return to that world.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

What 'I' Refers To

When someone says 'I', do they mean the body others can see? The epistle answers no, and rests the soul's survival on that answer.

Most people, and many theologians, the epistle says, take the human being to be this visible body. Against them it argues that what each person calls 'I' is a substance that is not a body. The body is always wasting and being rebuilt from food, yet a person remembers a whole life and knows himself to be the same throughout. Seeing, desiring, walking and thinking are all gathered by one thing that no bodily part can be. Because that substance moves and governs the body, the body's ruin cannot touch its existence.

  • soul-body dualism
  • soul-body relation
  • personal identity
  • soul
  • intellect
  • perception
  • immortality

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The Ranks of Souls

What becomes of a person after death depends on what they knew and how they lived. The epistle sorts the dead by those two measures and borrows the Qur'an's own three companies to name the result.

Souls perfect in both knowledge and action are those brought near to God and join the world of the intellects. Souls perfect in only one are the companions of the right; they join the heavenly spheres and probably rise in the end. Souls lacking both are the companions of the left, sunk in the seas of natural darkness at the bottom of the elemental bodies. A closing chapter lays out the order they rise or sink through: from God the intellects, souls and bodies of the heavens descend to a tenth intellect, and from it the world of the four elements.

  • afterlife
  • paradise
  • virtue ethics
  • moral perfection
  • moral progress
  • knowledge of god
  • justice
  • revelation
  • cosmology
  • celestial spheres
  • emanation
  • intellectual contemplation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
15
distinct concepts
39
by passages held, corpus-wide
#798

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. A Compendium on the Soul (Kitāb fī al-nafs ʿalā sunnat al-ikhtiṣār)

    The earliest of his books, written for the Sāmānid court at Bukhara before any of the summaries of philosophy that made his name.

     EN
  2. A Treatise on Love (Risāla fī māhiyyat al-ʿishq)

    Written at the request of a jurist, Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Maʿṣūmī, and set out in seven short sections.

     AR
  3. al-Najāt

    Between the vast al-Shifāʾ and the allusive Ishārāt in both length and manner, and the usual way into his logic.

     AR
  4. al-Taʿlīqāt

    A classroom companion to his metaphysics: short notes on its key terms, read today beside al-Shifāʾ.

     AR
  5. Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle (Fann al-Shiʿr)

    Filed under logic, as the Arabic tradition filed Aristotle's Poetics, it closes the nine logical books of al-Shifāʾ.

     AR
  6. Kitāb al-Nafs

    The fullest of his many accounts of the soul, written as natural science, and the one Latin Europe read.

     AR
  7. Kitāb al-Siyāsa

    The household branch of practical philosophy, set out for a man, his family and his servants, in a short Arabic treatise.

     AR
  8. Remarks and Admonitions (al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt)

    Shorter than al-Najāt and far shorter than al-Shifāʾ, though written after both, as a statement of his mature philosophy.

     AR
  9. Risāla fī maʿrifat al-nafs al-nāṭiqa wa-aḥwālihā you are here AR
  10. The Healing, Logic: Isagoge (al-Madkhal)

    The first of the nine books of logic in al-Shifāʾ, and the place where the prologue to the whole encyclopedia stands.

     AR
  11. The Metaphysics of The Healing (al-Ilāhiyyāt)

    His fullest metaphysics, known to Latin readers as the Liber de philosophia prima; it closes al-Shifāʾ after the logic, the physics and the mathematics.

     AR
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