Avicenna and the Human Soul as a Mirror: a Myth?

In the scholarship on Avicenna’s theory of the soul, one frequently comes across the claim that, in the eschatological context, the Persian philosopher compares the human soul with a mirror to refer to the supreme, intellectual beatitude the human soul acquires in the afterlife if appropriately trained during its earthly life. Some scholars have also argued that, in Nafs V, 6, Avicenna uses the same comparison in the epistemological context to explain how human intellection works and how the human soul relates to intellectual forms. This reconstruction of Avicenna’s argument(s) in Nafs V, 6, where the soul-mirror comparison features, is at odds with several doctrinal points of Avicenna’s philosophical psychology, and with the textual evidence. Thus, by looking at the text from Nafs V, 6 and the broader context to which it belongs, this paper calls into question the claim that the soul-mirror comparison expresses how Avicenna conceives of the relationship between the human soul and intellectual forms. In particular, a close textual inspection reveals that in Nafs V, 6, Avicenna uses the soul-mirror comparison to refer to a model for human intellection (i.e., that based on the reflection of a self-subsisting content outside and above the human intellect), which he rejects because he deems it unsuitable to account for how human intellect works.