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WorkAvicenna

The Metaphysics of The Healing

The book that made being itself the subject of metaphysics, and proved the existence of God as the one being that cannot fail to exist.

by Avicenna470 passages held

  • Arabic, the original language
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Original title
al-Ilāhiyyāt
Original language
Arabic

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Overview

Readers of Aristotle had long disagreed about what his Metaphysics is about: God, the first causes of things, or being as such. Avicenna opens al-Ilāhiyyāt (The Divine Things), the closing part of al-Shifāʾ (The Healing), by settling the question, and his answer set the terms of the subject for centuries. God cannot be the subject of this science, he argues, because no science proves the existence of its own subject, and the existence of God is exactly what metaphysics has to prove. Its subject is the existent insofar as it exists; God is what it is looking for. The proof he builds does not start from motion, as Aristotle's did, but from the difference between what must exist and what merely can. Whatever owes its existence to something else depends in the end on one being that owes it to nothing, the Necessary Existent (wājib al-wujūd), and every other thing, from the highest intellect down, receives its existence from that source. From there the book descends through the heavens to human society, and its last chapters treat prophecy, law and worship. They end on the ruler who joins practical virtue and theoretical wisdom to a prophet's gifts, whom the final sentence calls God's vicegerent on earth. A Latin translation made in Toledo in the twelfth century put the book before every scholastic philosopher from the end of that century on. In the Islamic world the challenge came from al-Ghazālī, the jurist and theologian, whose Incoherence of the Philosophers, written around 1095, contested twenty of the philosophers' teachings. Three of them, all from Avicenna's philosophy, he singled out: that the world has no beginning in time, that God knows only universals and not particular things, and that souls never return to bodies after death. Anyone who taught those three in public, he ruled, was an unbeliever.

Key concepts

What does 'the existent insofar as it exists' mean?

It means studying things only as existing, leaving aside what kind of thing they are. Physics studies bodies as they move and change; geometry studies magnitude; metaphysics asks what belongs to anything simply because it exists, such as being one or many, cause or effect, substance or accident. That makes it the one science whose subject covers everything, and the place where the other sciences' starting points are secured.

What is the Necessary Existent, wājib al-wujūd?

It is the being whose existence comes from itself, so that it cannot fail to exist. Everything else owes its existence to a cause. Avicenna argues that this being is one, has no parts and no definition, and has no essence besides its existence. It is what religion calls God, reached here by an argument about existence rather than about motion.

Why is an existing thing still only 'possible in itself'?

Because nothing in what it is requires it to exist. Taken in itself, a horse or a star could equally be or not be; it exists only because a cause makes it exist, and in that sense it is necessary through another. Avicenna's whole proof of God rests on this: a world made only of such things cannot explain its own existence.

How does what a thing is differ from the fact that it exists?

Knowing what a thing is does not tell you whether it exists. You can understand what a triangle is and still need to ask whether any triangle exists. For Avicenna, existence is therefore not part of the essence of any created thing; it comes to it from a cause. Only in the Necessary Existent are what it is and that it is the same.

Themes of the book

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

The Science of Being

What is the highest science actually about, if the God it seeks is something it has first to prove? Avicenna's answer gave metaphysics the subject it kept for centuries.

No science proves that its own subject exists, Avicenna argues, and metaphysics has to prove that God exists, so God cannot be its subject. Its subject is the existent insofar as it exists, studied not as moving body, as physics studies it, nor as magnitude, as geometry does. Existent, thing and necessary are the first notions, printed on the mind and explained by nothing clearer. From them the book works through substance, unity, number, matter and form, and the difference between what a thing is and the fact that it is.

  • metaphysics
  • essence
  • unity
  • substance
  • definition
  • existence
  • universals
  • individuation
  • accidents
  • quantity
  • number
  • matter
  • matter and form
  • potentiality

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The Being That Cannot Fail to Exist

If every thing we meet could equally have not existed, why does anything exist at all? The answer Avicenna builds needs no appeal to motion, and it reaches a God with no parts and no definition.

Considered in itself, anything is either necessary, possible or impossible. A possible thing exists only because a cause makes it exist, and that cause, if possible too, needs another. Avicenna argues that the whole series of such things depends on a being that is necessary through itself, the Necessary Existent, which has no parts, no genus and no essence besides its existence. From it, since one simple thing produces directly only one, comes a first intellect, and from that the intellects, souls and bodies of the heavens, down to the world we live in.

  • causation
  • necessary existence
  • celestial motion
  • motion

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The Prophet, the City and the Return

Why should a book that begins with being end with marriage, trade and prayer? For Avicenna the same order that descends from God has to be rebuilt in a human city and climbed again by the soul.

People cannot live without exchange, exchange needs law and justice, and law needs a lawgiver who is human and can speak to them, a prophet. The prophet's city has no idle members and forbids gain without benefit, as in gambling; its worship keeps the lawgiver's teaching alive. Its best ruler joins wisdom to a prophet's gifts and is God's vicegerent on earth. Beyond the city lies the soul's return: the joy of a perfected intellect, which a soul still in its body cannot feel, as a numbed man cannot taste the finest food.

  • afterlife
  • soul

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Within this work

passages held
470
distinct concepts
458
by passages held, corpus-wide
#159

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “causation” and “metaphysics”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 91 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
causationmetaphysics15
mattermetaphysics13
metaphysicsuniversals12
causationmatter11
essenceuniversals11
definitionessence9
essencemetaphysics8
definitionsubstance6
causationessence4
essencesubstance4
unityuniversals4
causationuniversals3
definitionmetaphysics3
definitionuniversals3
essencematter3
essenceunity3
mattersubstance3
substanceunity3
substanceuniversals3
causationsubstance2
definitionunity2
matteruniversals2
metaphysicssubstance2
metaphysicsunity2
causationdefinition1
definitionmatter1

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

    A short epistle in three chapters and an epilogue, one of several treatises on the soul that circulate under his name.

     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) you are here AR
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