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Ibn Sīnā

Ibn Sīnā (980–1037) defined wisdom by what it makes of the one who has it: “Wisdom is an art of theory by which a person acquires the attainment of how existence as a whole is in itself, and of what he must do … so that his soul may be ennobled and perfected and become an intelligible world corresponding to the existing world, and be prepared for ultimate happiness in the hereafter, according to human capacity” (Divisions of the Rational Sciences). Its two parts have two ends: “the end of the theoretical part is truth, and the end of the practical is the good”. The Law falls within it. In politics “the treatment of prophecy and the Law is contained in their [the philosophers’] two books on the laws”, and “Through this part of practical wisdom one knows the necessity of prophecy and the human species’ need of the Law”; the philosophers, he adds, do not mean by the law “what the vulgar believe, which is that the nomos is nothing but a device and deceit” (tr. Mahdi).

He wrote philosophy in two registers and said so. In the prologue to The Cure (al-Shifāʾ): “I also wrote a book other than these two, in which I presented philosophy as it is naturally [perceived] and as required by an unbiased view which neither takes into account in [this book] the views of colleagues in the discipline … this is my book on Eastern philosophy. But as for the present book, it is more elaborate and more accommodating to my Peripatetic colleagues” (tr. Gutas). The Easterners (al-Mashriqiyyūn) opens on its method: “We have resolved to compile a treatise on matters about which researchers have disagreed. In it we shall neither proceed by following Partisan considerations, our own fancy, Customary Practice, or personal habit.” He faulted Aristotle’s successors for spending “their lives in efforts to understand what he accomplished best and in Partisan Adherence to some defective theories he originated … neither … thinking it permissible to consider the statements of the ancients in need of addition, correction, or revision”, and set himself to “gather the loose ends”. His late Pointers and Reminders (al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt) is written, as its title says, in pointers and reminders, which the student was to complete himself.

How he learned he told in his autobiography. “I read the Metaphysics [of Aristotle], but I could not comprehend its contents … even when I had gone back and read it forty times and had got to the point where I had memorized it … ‘This is a book which there is no way of understanding.’” A bookseller then sold him “Abu Nasr al-Farabi’s book on the objects of the Metaphysics”, and “in no time the objects of that book became clear to me”. When a problem baffled him, “not being able to solve the middle term of the syllogism, I used to visit the mosque frequently and worship … until He opened the mystery of it to me”. Of his learning in later life: “at that time I had a better memory for learning, but today my knowledge is more mature; otherwise it is the same; nothing new has come to me since” (tr. Gohlman).