Anthropology in the Absence of the Human Soul: Abu’l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī’s Understanding of the Human Being in its Philosophical Context

Abstract

This dissertation is an exploration of the philosophical anthropology of the eponymous founder of the Ashʿarī school of Islamic philosophy, Abu’l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 324/935-6). By “philosophical anthropology” I refer to the philosophical inquiry into the question of what human beings are, or what it means to be a human being – that is, the study of the ontology and metaphysics of the human being. A comprehensive understanding of al-Ashʿarī’s theory of the human being is not possible without knowledge of the more fundamental elements of his philosophy. For this reason, the first chapter of the dissertation is dedicated to al-Ashʿarī’s philosophy of language and the second to his ontology and general metaphysics. Once this groundwork is laid, the discussion moves on to the content of al-Ashʿarī’s anthropology: Chapter 3 presents the basic framework of his understanding of the human being. That understanding is contrasted with the many alternative anthropological models that were present in al-Ashʿarī’s time in order to show the kinds of views he was familiar with and declined to adopt. Chapter 4 introduces the idea that Al-Ashʿarī’s own model does not feature a concept of the human soul, where the human soul is understood to be a separable entity bearing the human being’s identity and performing other core functions related to human cognition, consciousness, and agency. Here, I argue that no possible conceptual candidates from the Islamic context, as al-Ashʿarī understands them, answer to the idea of a separable soul within his anthropology. Again, al-Ashʿarī’s understandings of these terms is compared with competing contemporary views thereon, revealing the philosophical alternatives that were available to him as he theorized about the various elements that make up the human being. The absence of a soul-concept in al-Ashʿarī’s anthropology raises the question of how he accounted for the human behaviors and characteristics that have been associated with such a concept throughout history. Chapter 5 addresses this issue, examining how al-Ashʿarī dealt with the phenomena often attributed to the soul. The chapter deals with questions of identity, persistence, eschatology, cognition, and agency. There, I cover al-Ashʿarī’s limited cardiocentrism, which assigns some of the functions one might associate with a human soul to the physical heart – not as a matter of metaphysical necessity, but rather as a function of how God chose to create human beings. In order to reconstruct al-Ashʿarī’s anthropology, I rely primarily on Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Fūrak’s (d. 406/1015) Mujarrad maqālāt al-Shaykh Abi’l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī. In this text, Ibn Fūrak recounts the philosophical positions of al-Ashʿarī – the teacher of his teacher – in great detail. For knowledge of competing contemporary ideas al-Ashʿarī was familiar with, I rely on his doxography, Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn wa ikhtilāf al-muṣallīn. These texts are the ones that are best positioned to provide a strong representation of al-Ashʿarī’s positive philosophy and his knowledge of the philosophical positions of other parties. They are supplemented at times with supporting texts, including al-Ashʿarī’s al-Lumaʿ fi’l-radd ʿalā ahl al-zayghi wa’l-bidaʿ and the works of Abū al-Qāsim al-Anṣārī (d. 512/1118), a later Ashʿarī thinker who provides us with a perspective from the brink of the post-classical period. Other doxographical primary source texts as well as secondary sources are consulted to provide depth to al-Ashʿarī’s portrayals of other schools. However, these perspectives are usually presented in the footnotes, as the question of primary concern is not what those other parties actually believed but rather what al-Ashʿarī thought that they believed. Efforts to understand and present al-Ashʿarī’s system of thought are valuable because his work in the 10th century helped shape the method, character, content, and boundaries of a massively influential school of thought that persists until our time. Al-Ashʿarī’s anthropology is both central to his thought and is also an excellent case study by which to examine the vast tapestry of his wider philosophy. It reveals the commonsense approach that would characterize the early period of Ashʿarī thought. The goal of this dissertation is to present that case study and, in doing so, to demonstrate the breadth and character of al-Ashʿarī’s personal philosophical system. Such a portrayal stands to enrich our understanding of his impact on the school that bears his name. Beyond this, it stands to lend some nuance to the study of the early period of Islamic philosophy and open up new avenues for discourse between kalām and modern philosophy.