Avicenna's dualistic theory

Since practically the beginning of philosophy, dualism, the idea that the body and the soul are two radically different elements It has permeated the way of thinking of many people. It is a belief that fits very easily with our experience, since our consciousness is one thing, linked to what we subjectively experience, and another thing is what we intuit is beyond it, whether we are aware of it or not: the environment that surrounds us, other people, and even our own body, bones and soul. meat.

But this idea that body and soul are different, which can be reformulated thinking that there is a separation between the organism and the mental life of that organism, is not a self-evident truth same. It exists because behind it there has been a philosophical tradition that began many centuries ago and has been passed down through the generations. Next we will see one of the first links in this chain: Avicenna's dualistic theory.

• Related article: "Dualism in Psychology"

Who was Avicenna?

Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna (the latter name is the Latinized version) was

a philosopher, physician and scientist born in the year 980 in Bukhara, at that time part of Persia. Already in the early years of his life he proved to be a child prodigy, and in his teens he became famous for his abilities as a doctor. His fame made it possible for him to work as a doctor and adviser to various princes.

Upon reaching the age of 21, he began to write a wide variety of texts and books, which numbered almost three hundred. They dealt with subjects as diverse as medicine, metaphysics,

Although his mother tongue was Persian, his intellectual life was conducted in Arabic, and in fact he was one of the main people in charge of transferring to Arabic literature the ideas of Aristotle.

Finally, Avicenna died around the year 1037, possibly because someone poisoned him with one of the medical preparations he used.

• Related article: "Plato's theory of ideas"

Avicenna's dualistic theory: its main ideas

These are the foundations of Avicenna's dualistic theory.

1. Truth can be accessed through reason

Avicenna believed that there are truths that one can access using reason. From this idea, he tried to start building a way of thinking based solely on what has logical evidence, discarding from the outset everything that does not stand on its own, something that centuries later the famous French philosopher René discards.

So that, Avicenna rejected all ideas that could be falsified. and he was left only with what he understood to be absolute truths.

2. The floating man theory experiment

Since Avicenna wanted to arrive at the truth by using logic, he used a theoretical experiment to know what the nature of the human being is, since its result should not depend on details linked to the context in which this exercise is carried out; if something is self-evident, it need not be based on things that are actually happening.

Thus, Avicenna imagined a situation in which a person had just been born and, without having any material experience, but with reasoning capacity. From the beginning, moreover, there is a curious situation: that person remains floating in the air, with their legs and arms extended and all his senses annulled: he neither sees, nor hears, nor can he feel the touch of anything, etc.

Faced with this hypothetical situation, Avicenna points out that this person would not know that he has a body, but he would know that he has a mind.

3. The mind knows that it exists

The fundamental difference between the mind and the body is that the former knows that it exists, while the latter, whatever happens, cannot be attributed this capacity. The existence of the mental is self-evident in whom he is aware of his existence. This makes the spiritual and the material radically different: the bodies are not aware of anything, but we are. Therefore, in what we call "I" there is a component that is not the body itself.

Despite having been greatly inspired by the thought of Aristotle (which even led him to deny some of the fundamentals of Islam), differed from him in the idea that the material and the spiritual are two dimensions of the same thing. For Avicenna, in the human body, the mind and the flesh are two substances that have a totally different nature.

criticism of dualism

Psychology and much of Philosophy Today they reject dualism, for many reasons. The first is that is based solely on speculation, situations that are neither real nor can they be. If to prove dualism you have to imagine experiences that are not and cannot be real, then they tell you nothing about what is real.

The second criticism is that many times the defense of dualism stems from errors in the use of language. To confuse "consciousness" with "mind" or "mental life," for example, is to use simple categories to group very abstract, which can lead to use each of these categories changing their meaning from time to time without being aware of it.

Finally, the third major criticism is that to sustain its validity, one must assume that there are many things that they belong to a spiritual dimension that cannot be accessed, which means that there is no reason to believe in they. In this sense, dualism part of a type of circular reasoning: to reach the conclusion that the spiritual (as something separate from the material) exists, one must assume that it exists.

Avicenna's experiment, for example, presents us with a situation that cannot occur: someone who is not stimulated sensory from birth cannot become self-aware, and will probably die very early.