The Genius Who Explained God, the Soul & the Universe | Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

[00:00:00]In the early 11th century, a philosopher working in Isvahan built [music] a case for the existence of God using nothing but pure reasoning. No scripture, no miracle, no appeal to faith, just logic [music] structured step by step until it reached a single unavoidable conclusion. [music] His name was Iben Cena, known in the west as Avisenna, and his argument is still taught in philosophy departments a thousand years later. In Islamic theology, this line of reasoning became known as Burhan al-Sidikin, the proof of the truthful, because it claims [music] to prove God's existence directly from the nature of existence itself without needing to point to the world's design [music] or its beginning in time.

[00:00:51]Iben Cena was born around 980 near Bkhara in a region then ruled by the Salmonid [music] dynasty.

[00:00:59]He was reading and mastering texts on logic, medicine, and law before he turned 18. And he is said to have worked through Aristotle's metaphysics [music] dozens of times before he felt he understood it.

[00:01:12]He spent his [music] adult life moving between courts in Central Asia and Persia, working as a physician and government official while writing [music] at a pace few scholars in history have matched. His medical text, The Canon of Medicine, was used in European universities for 600 years. But it is his metaphysics laid out most fully in his book, The Cure, that gives him a permanent seat among the greatest philosophers to write in Arabic.

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[00:02:19]Ibincena's entire system starts from a distinction so simple it is easy to miss its weight. Take any object and ask two separate questions about it. First, what is it? Second, does it exist? These sound like the same question, but Iben Cena insisted they are not. The answer to what is it is what he called mahia, the essence or whatness of a thing. A triangle's essence is that it has three sides and its angles add up to 180°.

[00:02:49]That description is true whether or not any triangle is actually drawn anywhere in the universe. You can picture a unicorn in complete detail, know exactly what it would be made of and what it would look like, and still know that no unicorn exists.

[00:03:03]The essence is complete in your mind.

[00:03:05]The existence is missing.

[00:03:07]The answer to does it exist is wujud existence itself. The sheer fact that something is actually present in reality rather than only imagined or possible.

[00:03:19]Ibansena's move was to argue that wujud is not baked into mahia. Existence has to be added to essence from the outside.

[00:03:27]Nothing about the concept of a horse forces a horse into being. Something else has to grant it existence. This single distinction is the hinge on which the rest of Ibncena's [music] metaphysics turns. And it is why medieval philosophers in Paris and Cologne centuries later were still arguing about whether he was right.

[00:03:47]Once essence and existence are pulled apart, Ibna sorts everything that could possibly be into two categories. The first category is alujud meaning possible in existence or contingent being. This covers literally everything you can point to. Trees, planets, people, stars. A contingent thing's essence does not include existence. A tree could exist or could fail to exist.

[00:04:13]And nothing in the definition of tree settles the matter either way. Since existence isn't automatic for it, something outside the tree has to cause it to exist. That cause is itself another contingent thing which in turn needed its own cause and so on.

[00:04:28]Iben Cena then asks, "What happens if you follow that chain of causes [music] backward forever?"

[00:04:34]His answer is that an endless chain going back with no starting point cannot actually explain anything. A series made up entirely of things that each depend on something else with no first member that doesn't depend on anything never actually accounts for why the whole series exists rather than not. You need something at the root of the chain whose existence is not borrowed from anything else.

[00:04:57]That something is the second category aluj the necessary existent. This Arabic phrase translates literally as the [music] necessitated of existence and it names a being for whom essence and existence are not two separate [music] things joined together but one and the same.

[00:05:17]For waj balujud [music] asking what is it and does it exist produces the same answer. Its nature simply is to exist.

[00:05:28]It cannot fail to exist any more than a triangle can fail to have three sides.

[00:05:34]Nothing causes it because being caused would mean something else grants it existence and that would make it contingent not necessary.

[00:05:43]Ibans Cena identifies this necessary existent wajalujud with God. [music] It is worth being precise about what kind of proof this is. Ibans Cena is not arguing that the universe needed a first cause billions of years ago [music] the way a domino chain needs a first push.

[00:06:02]He is arguing something stronger.

[00:06:04][music] That right now at this instant the existence of every contingent thing in the universe depends on something whose existence needs no explanation outside itself.

[00:06:16]Take away Wajib al- Wujud for even a moment in this [music] argument and nothing contingent could exist at all.

[00:06:24]If waj balujud is completely simple without parts without change without multiplicity of any kind a hard question follows immediately. How does a universe full of countless different things come from something so undivided?

[00:06:40]Ibensena answers with a version of a theory he inherited from the neoplatonic tradition called emanation.

[00:06:49]Nothing about emanation involves God building or crafting the way a carpenter builds a table. Instead, existence flows outward from the necessary existent. The way light radiates [music] from a source automatically and eternally without effort or decision in the human sense.

[00:07:09]The first thing to emanate from Wajib al-ujud is a single being. Ibans Cena calls the first [music] intellect.

[00:07:17]Because this first intellect is caused, it is contingent. [music] And being contingent, it contains within itself a distinction the necessary existent doesn't have. It can think about the source that caused it, and it can think about its own possibility of existing versus not existing. Out of these two acts of thought, three further things emanate from it. a second intellect, the soul of a celestial sphere and the body of that sphere.

[00:07:51]This process repeats. Each intellect in the chain gives rise to the next intellect [music] along with a heavenly sphere and its soul producing a ladder of 10 intellects in total corresponding in Ibansena's astronomy to the moon, the sun, the five visible planets, and the outer [music] spheres of the cosmos.

[00:08:15]The 10th and final rung of this ladder is called the active intellect. This is the point where the chain stops producing new celestial spheres and instead turns toward the material world beneath the moon. The active intellect gives form to matter, shaping raw physical stuff into the specific kinds of things we see around us. And it is also responsible for actualizing human thought, which becomes [music] important in Ibansena's account of the soul.

[00:08:41]Ibnina treats the soul as an immaterial substance distinct from the body but working through it during a person's life. The soul is responsible for everything from basic sense perception up through imagination and at its highest level reasoning.

[00:09:00]The rational part of the soul, the intellect, starts out only with potential. A newborn does not yet grasp abstract truths. Iben Cena describes the process of learning as the active intellect, the 10th and lowest of the celestial intellects described above, illuminating the human mind and turning potential understanding into actual understanding. Roughly the way sunlight makes objects that are only potentially visible actually visible.

[00:09:28]From this picture, Ibans Cena builds an argument for the soul's immortality.

[00:09:33]Because the rational soul can grasp universal truths that are themselves immaterial and unchanging, the soul doing the grasping must itself be immaterial.

[00:09:43]Iben Cena argues separately that the soul is not the kind of thing that can break apart since it isn't made of physical parts the way a body is and things that don't have parts can't be destroyed by having their parts [music] separated, which is how physical death actually operates.

[00:10:01]Death ends the body's functions, but it does not touch the soul's core nature.

[00:10:06]After death, Ibanscina holds that the soul continues [music] on, its condition shaped by how much intellectual and moral development it achieved while joined to the body.

[00:10:18]Another problem Iben Cena tackles is where general concepts like horse or triangle as opposed to any one particular horse or triangle actually exist.

[00:10:29]He gives three answers, not one, [music] because he thinks the concept exists in three different ways depending on where you look for it.

[00:10:39]Inside the divine intellect, before any horses exist at all, horse exists as an archetype [music] prior to and independent of any individual animal. Ibansina calls [music] this existence anti-rem meaning before the thing. Once actual horses are running around in the world, horse also exists inside [music] each one of them as their shared nature existing in re in the thing. And once a human mind observes several horses and abstracts the common pattern into a general concept. Horse exists a third way postrem after the thing inside human thought. Three locations, one concept.

[00:11:25]And Ibncina uses this framework to explain how a single unchanging necessary existent can still be the ultimate source of the endless variety of [music] concepts and categories found in a changing world.

[00:11:39]This raises an old problem. If the world is full of change and God's knowledge is unchanging, how can God know a world that keeps changing without God changing along with it?

[00:11:51]Ibansena's answer is that Wajib al-Wjud knows everything by knowing itself as the cause from which everything else emanates. Since it is the source of the entire causal order, understanding itself completely means understanding in one [music] single unchanging act everything that flows from it, including every contingent thing and every cause and effect relationship that will ever occur. This is knowledge of things in a universal way through their causes rather than knowledge gained the way humans learn things by observing individual events one at a time as they happen. Ibansena's claim is that this lets divine knowledge stay complete and unchanging while still in a sense accounting for a world that is never standing still.

[00:12:40]Ibincena's system [music] did not sit unchallenged. Al Gazali writing about a century later attacked several of its core claims directly including the idea that the world emanates eternally from God rather than being freely created.

[00:12:53]And it was Al Gazali's critique that pushed [music] later Islamic philosophy toward new directions. Some of which folded Ibanscena's ideas into Sufi metaphysics rather than rejecting them outright.

[00:13:06]In Latin Europe, Ibanscena's works arrived through translation beginning in the 12th century and became required reading for scholastic philosophers.

[00:13:14]Thomas Aquinus, writing in the 13th century, adopted the essence existence distinction as one of the foundations of his own proof for God's existence while reworking several of Ibansena's specific conclusions to fit Christian theology.

[00:13:29]The concept of a being whose essence and existence are identical. First laid out in Arabic under the name Waj Wujud became in Latin one of the standard descriptions of God used throughout medieval Christian philosophy. The distinction between what a thing is and that a thing is first sharpened into a precise philosophical tool in 10th and 11th century Bkar and Isvahan remains part of how philosophers frame the question of existence today.