Avicenna’s Flying Man and Self-Present Soul

Islamic philosopher Avicenna holds that the human soul is an immaterial, self-subsisting substance whose very existence consists in its awareness of itself, and that this awareness is primitive, permanent, and prior to every sensory episode rather than derived from any of them. His famous “Flying Man” thought experiment, in which a person created fully formed and suspended in air without any sensory contact would still affirm his own existence, is designed to isolate exactly this: a phenomenal presence that survives the subtraction of all perceptual content. Contemporary scholarship treats him as the first philosopher to make first-personal givenness a systematic explanandum, and his framework passed both westward into Latin scholasticism and eastward into the Illuminationist and Ṣadrian traditions, where its vocabulary of knowledge by presence remains in active use.

In other words, Avicenna offers one of the most developed premodern theories relevant to phenomenal consciousness, combining an elaborate neurocognitive psychology of sensation, imagination, affective significance, memory, and thought with the radical thesis that the human self is an immaterial substance possessing primitive, immediate self-awareness independently of awareness of its body. What we now call phenomenal consciousness therefore has two importantly different dimensions in his system: embodied sensory experience depends upon bodily organs and hierarchically organized perceptual faculties, whereas the most fundamental awareness of oneself belongs intrinsically to the rational soul and is neither sensory nor representational in the ordinary sense (Avicenna, 1952; Black, 2008; Kaukua, 2015). His synthesis profoundly influenced Islamic and Latin medieval philosophy, especially theories of internal sense and self-awareness, while the Flying Man remains pertinent to contemporary debates about minimal self-consciousness and embodiment.

From Aristotle to an Immaterial Soul as a Self-Subsisting Substance

Avicenna begins from Aristotelian faculty psychology but substantially transforms its metaphysics. He inherits the Aristotelian definition of soul as the perfection of an organic living body, distinguishing vegetative, animal, and rational powers, but breaks with it on the crucial point: the human rational soul is not merely the form of the body in Aristotle’s ordinary hylomorphic sense. Its intellectual activity requires no bodily organ, and Avicenna ultimately regards each human rational soul as an individual immaterial substance whose existence is not reducible to its relation to the body (Avicenna, 1952; McGinnis, 2010).

Thus, the soul is a substance in its own right, immaterial, individuated at the moment of its body's generation, and capable of surviving the body's dissolution. The argument turns on the intellect's reception of universal, indivisible intelligibles, which Avicenna holds cannot be imprinted in a divisible corporeal organ (Shifāʾ: Nafs V.2). This is why he is standardly read as a substance dualist despite his Aristotelian idiom.

In other words, Avicenna’smind-body architecture is distinctively dualistic. Sensation, imagination, estimation, memory, emotion, and much practical cognition operate through bodily faculties, particularly the brain. Intellectual cognition and fundamental self-awareness belong to the incorporeal rational soul. The soul comes into existence in conjunction with an appropriately organized body, and once generated it does not perish when the body dies (Avicenna, 1952; Gutas, 2014). Avicenna is consequently much more clearly dualist than Aristotle or Aquinas, even though his psychology remains Aristotelian in structure. The consequence for consciousness is direct: whatever awareness is, it belongs in the first instance to something that is not the body.

The Architecture of Phenomenal Experience

Avicenna never isolates “qualia” or poses the modern hard problem. Nevertheless, his account of animal cognition constitutes a sophisticated theory of how a unified experienced world is constructed. The five external senses receive sensible forms, which are integrated by common sense (al-ḥiss al-mushtarak). This is followed by a carefully differentiated system of internal senses located, according to his medieval physiology, in the ventricles of the brain (Avicenna, 1952; Black, 1993).

The formative or retentive imagination preserves sensible forms after their objects are absent. The compositive imagination separates and recombines them. Most distinctive is wahm, usually translated “estimation,” which apprehends nonsensible “intentions” or meanings presented by particular things: the paradigmatic sheep does not merely perceive the sensible properties of a wolf but apprehends it as dangerous. Memory preserves these intentions (Avicenna, 1952; Black, 1993).

For a contemporary reconstruction of phenomenal consciousness, this matters because Avicenna’s conscious world is not a mosaic of bare sensory qualities. Perceptual experience is unified, retained across time, imaginatively manipulable, affectively and behaviorally significant, and structured in terms of what objects mean for the organism. His theory consequently anticipates, without being equivalent to, distinctions now drawn among sensory representation, perceptual integration, affective appraisal, memory, and higher cognition.

The Flying Man

The thought experiment appears in several forms across the Avicennian corpus, most prominently at Shifāʾ: Nafs I.1 and V.7 and again in al-Ishārāt wa-l-Tanbīhāt. Suppose a person created all at once, mature and complete, floating in a void, sight veiled, limbs held apart and touching nothing, with no memory because there is no past. Avicenna claims such a person would affirm the existence of his own self while affirming nothing whatever about his body, his limbs, or any external object. The objective of his argument is disputed. Some readings take it as a demonstration of the soul's immateriality, some as a non-demonstrative pointer to something already given, and some as an argument that self-awareness cannot be constituted by anything bodily (Kaukua, 2015; Almotahari, 2025). What is not disputed is what it isolates: an awareness with no object other than itself and no sensory content.

Primitive and Reflective Self-Awareness

The distinction that carries most of the theoretical weight separates primitive from reflective self-awareness (Black, 2008; Kaukua, 2015). Primitive self-awareness is non-propositional, non-inferential, and continuous. It is not an act directed at the self as an object; Avicenna argues explicitly against reflection models on the grounds that any second-order act presupposes the very first-personality it was meant to explain. Reflective self-awareness, by contrast, is the ordinary awareness that one is perceiving or thinking, and it is intermittent. The striking claim, developed most fully in the late Taʿlīqāt, is that primitive self-awareness never lapses: it is present in sleep, in drunkenness, and in total absorption in an external object, precisely because it is identical with the soul's existence rather than being one of its activities (Kaukua, 2015). Avicenna also mounts an argument from the unity of experience, holding that the single subject to which sight, hearing, and thought are all referred cannot be any one faculty among them.

The Internal Senses and Perceptual Content

As noted, Avicenna assigns qualitative perceptual content to a different and explicitly corporeal embodiment. He posits five internal senses seated in the ventricles of the brain: common sense, which unifies the modalities into one presentation; the retentive imagination, which stores sensible forms; the compositive imagination or cogitative faculty, which recombines them; estimation, which apprehends non-sensory intentions such as the hostility of a predator; and memory, which retains those intentions (Shifāʾ: Nafs I.5, IV.1). Estimation is the innovation with the longest afterlife and the most contested internal logic, since the intentions it grasps are not reducible to sensible qualities yet are apprehended by a bodily power (Black, 1993). The structural result is a split account: the felt richness of perception is handled by an embodied faculty psychology, while the bare fact of first-personal presence is handled by the immaterial substance. Whether these two halves can be joined is the objection later Islamic critics hit hardest.

From Avicenna to the Latin West and Aquinas

Avicenna’s influence on subsequent theories of mind was enormous. The psychological book of the Shifāʾ was translated into Latin in the twelfth century as Liber de Anima and helped establish the medieval doctrine of the internal senses (Hasse, 2000), becoming one of the most influential psychological texts of the Middle Ages, shaping the scholastic treatment of the internal senses and supplying the terminology of intentio that later reaches Brentano (Hasse, 2000). The flying man was repeated by a series of thirteenth-century authors, though its argumentative role shifted from an ontological proof of the soul's immateriality to an epistemological point about self-knowledge (Toivanen, 2015). The comparison with Descartes has generated a substantial literature (Druart, 1988; Hasnawi, 1997). The standard consensus is that the mind-body dualism resemblance is real, but the arguments diverge: Avicenna is not seeking indubitability, does not conclude that the self is a thinking thing whose essence is thought, and elsewhere maintains an empiricism about concept acquisition (Gutas, 2012).

Aquinas adopts much of this cognitive architecture—common sense, imagination, estimation/cogitation, and memory—while modifying it and rejecting Avicenna’s stronger separation of soul and body (Black, 1999; Müller, 2015). Aquinas also ultimately rejects Avicenna’s conception of continuous primitive self-awareness: for Aquinas, the intellect ordinarily knows itself through awareness of its own acts rather than through an independently given self-presence.

Islamic Philosophy: Suhrawardī, Mullā Ṣadrā, and Knowledge by Presence

The Islamic trajectory is at least as important. The eastward line is where Avicenna's account of self-awareness became a foundational reference point for post-Avicennian philosophy and theology. Suhrawardī radicalized immediate self-awareness into a theory of knowledge by presence, while rejecting Avicenna’s inference from self-awareness to a substantial self. Suhrawardī recast it in terms of al-ʿilm al-ḥuḍūrī, knowledge by presence, in which the self is known not through any representation but by immediate self-manifestation, and generalized this into a theory of knowledge and being (Eichner, 2011; Kaukua, 2015). Mullā Ṣadrā subsequently retained Avicennian insights about primitive self-presence and the primacy of self-awareness, but reconceived the underlying concept of selfhood dynamically through his metaphysics of existence and substantial motion (Kaukua, 2015), treating the soul as mutable rather than fixed and identifying awareness with degrees of existence itself (Rahman, 1975).

Contemporary Islamic discussions of consciousness drawing on Ṣadrian philosophy thus inherit Avicennian ancestry, particularly self-presence, immaterial mentality, and the relation between knowledge and existence, even where they reject Avicenna’s static substance ontology. Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī had already pressed alternatives that keep self-awareness while loosening its tie to substance. This vocabulary remains contemporary: Ha'iri Yazdi (1992) presented knowledge by presence to analytic philosophers as a viable contemporary epistemological position, and it continues to function as working terminology in Iranian ḥikmat.

Contemporary Significance and Limits

Avicenna’s strongest contemporary relevance lies in theories of minimal or pre-reflective self-consciousness. The Flying Man has recently been brought into dialogue with phenomenology, bodily self-awareness, interoception, agency, and the “minimal self” (Gallagher, 2023), and pre-reflective self-consciousness is said to find a parallel in the phenomenological tradition, where the structural claim is nearly identical (Zahavi, 2005; Kaukua, 2015). Its affinities with Cartesian certainty are striking, but historical claims that Avicenna directly caused Descartes’s cogito remain unestablished.

For phenomenal consciousness more generally, Avicenna offers an unusual combination: richly embodied sensory phenomenology alongside an ultimately nonphysical subject of experience. He does not explain why sensory processing feels like anything, and his ventricular neuroscience is obviously archaic. Yet his separation of perceptual content from primitive first-personal self-presence identifies a distinction still central to consciousness studies: the difference between what experience presents and the fact that experience is given to a subject at all.

Thus, Avicenna's contribution to the phenomenal-consciousness debate is a claim about the givenness of experience, not a mechanism for what brings it about. He argues that first-personal presence is the most immediate datum available, that it cannot be constructed out of anything else, and that reflection models invert the order of explanation. Its deficit, as with many theories of consciousness, is that Avicenna's account explains nothing about qualitative character, which is displaced onto a faculty psychology that is corporeal and now obsolete, and it purchases the permanence of self-awareness at the price of a nonphysical substance that is by construction unavailable to either empirical or introspective check. Both features make him a clear ancestor of self-representational and first-personality accounts, and an equally clear illustration of how far such accounts can go without touching qualia. Whether that first-personal givenness requires an immaterial soul is precisely where Avicenna’s enduring insight becomes his most controversial metaphysical claim.

References

[Convention note: Avicenna's psychology is cited as Shifāʾ: Nafs by book and chapter, following Rahman's 1959 edition of the Arabic text, which governs the numbering used here. Taʿlīqāt is cited to Badawī's edition.]

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