al-Najāt

(lit.: The Salvation)

Avicenna's whole system cut down to one volume, from logic to God, and partly put together from treatises he had already written.

by Avicenna327 passages held

Arabic, the original language

Original language: Arabic

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Overview

A group of friends, Avicenna writes in the preface, asked him for a single book holding what anyone needed to know who wished to stand apart from the common run of people and grasp the principles of philosophy. They named the order themselves: logic, then physics, then the mathematical sciences ending with music, then metaphysics, with the soul's return to God and the conduct that leads there. The book was to bring salvation from drowning in a sea of errors, and al-Najāt (The Salvation) takes its name from that phrase. Avicenna did not write it from scratch. After finishing al-Shifāʾ (The Healing), he assembled the shorter work from what he had already written, at times splicing earlier treatises together, so that its logic largely keeps views he held around 1014. His pupil and companion Jūzjānī reported that Avicenna compiled it on a military campaign with his patron ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla, the Kākūyid ruler of Isfahan; historians allow that the report may be exaggerated. The mathematics promised in the preface was lost in Avicenna's lifetime. Jūzjānī later rebuilt it from his master's other writings; that section is not part of the text given here. What remains is the system in brief: a logic that leaves out dialectic, rhetoric and poetics; a physics whose sixth treatise is on the soul; and a metaphysics that rises to the Necessary Existent (wājib al-wujūd), the being that cannot fail to exist, and ends on providence, on how evil enters a world God has ordained, and on the soul's origin and return.

Key concepts

What can a proof start from, according to The Salvation?

Only from premises that are certain. Avicenna lists them: first truths the mind cannot doubt, such as that the whole is greater than its part; what the senses witness; what repeated experience confirms, as that scammony purges bile; and reports passed on by so many people that doubting them is impossible. Opinions that are merely popular or plausible serve debate and persuasion, not proof.

What is the difference between a proof of 'that' and a proof of 'why'?

A proof of 'that' shows that something is the case, often by reasoning from an effect back to its cause. A proof of 'why' reasons from the cause, so it shows both that the thing is so and the reason it must be. For Avicenna only the second gives full scientific understanding, which is why the higher sciences, which know the causes, can explain what the lower ones only establish.

What is evil, on this book's account?

Evil is a lack: the absence of some existence or perfection a thing ought to have, such as sight in an eye or health in a body. What causes such a lack is called evil only by accident. Fire burning is fire being perfect, and it is evil only in relation to what it destroys. So nothing is evil in itself, and evil belongs only to things made of matter.

What does providence, ʿināya, mean here?

Providence is God's knowing, through knowing himself, the best possible order of existence, and that knowledge being itself the cause of that order. It is not a plan worked out in time or a choice among options. Because the order follows from God's knowledge, the world has as much good as matter can receive, and its evils come with goods that would be lost without them.

Themes of the book

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

Out of the Sea of Errors

What must a person know to stop drowning in mistaken opinions? Friends asked Avicenna for the minimum, and he began with the rules that tell a sound argument from a plausible one.

The preface promises a book for anyone who wants to stand apart from the common run and hold the principles of philosophy, and its logic is built for certainty alone. It skips the arts of debate, persuasion and poetry and goes straight to what a proof may start from: truths no sane person doubts, such as that the whole is greater than the part, what the senses show, what repeated experience confirms, and reports so widespread that no one questions them. On these it builds the syllogism and the demonstration that shows why a thing is so.

logic
syllogistic
definition
demonstration
modality
modal logic
necessity
universals
essence

Enter a dialogue

Evil in a World Ordered for the Good

If the world flows from a God who knows and wills the best order, why does fire burn the innocent? The metaphysics of the Salvation ends by facing that question head on.

Avicenna's answer is that evil is no thing in its own right but a lack: of existence, or of some perfection a thing should have. Fire burning is fire being perfect; it is evil only for the one it harms, and only by accident. A world without fire would lose a great good to avoid a lesser evil, and losing much good is the greater evil. So evil is rare, attached to matter, and the price of a world where natures act as they are. Providence means that God's knowledge of the best order is itself its cause.

evil
causation
divine simplicity
cosmology
emanation
celestial motion
metaphysics
matter
motion
intellect
soul

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 327
distinct concepts: 458
by passages held, corpus-wide: #231

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: “demonstration” and “logic”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 94 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
demonstration	logic	8
causation	demonstration	6
causation	metaphysics	6
causation	necessity	5
causation	soul	5
causation	motion	3
causation	logic	2
intellect	soul	2
logic	necessity	2
metaphysics	motion	2
metaphysics	necessity	2
causation	intellect	1
demonstration	intellect	1
demonstration	metaphysics	1
intellect	metaphysics	1
metaphysics	soul	1
motion	soul	1

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.

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
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
al-Najāt you are here AR
al-Taʿlīqāt
A classroom companion to his metaphysics: short notes on its key terms, read today beside al-Shifāʾ.
AR
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
Kitāb al-Nafs
The fullest of his many accounts of the soul, written as natural science, and the one Latin Europe read.
AR
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
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
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
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
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

— or open another of their works