Avicenna Quote on the Flying Man: Self-Awareness

Quote

"One of us must imagine himself as created all at once, fully formed and perfect, but with his vision veiled from the perception of external things: not seeing, not hearing, not touching — suspended in the air, falling, with no air resistance to make him feel anything. Would he affirm the existence of his own self? He would not doubt that he exists." — Avicenna (Ibn Sina), The Book of Healing, De Anima (c. 1027)

Author

Avicenna (Ibn Sina, c. 980–1037) was a Persian physician, philosopher, and scientist of the Islamic Golden Age, the most influential philosopher of the medieval Islamic world. Born near Bukhara, he memorized the Qur'an by age ten, read the Greek philosophical tradition, and produced a vast corpus including the Canon of Medicine, which remained a standard medical textbook in Europe for centuries, and the Book of Healing, his philosophical encyclopedia. His synthesis of Aristotle, Neoplatonism, and Islamic thought shaped both the later Islamic tradition and the Latin scholastic tradition, where he was known as "the prince of philosophers."

Source

The quotation is a translation of a passage from the De Anima (On the Soul) section of Avicenna's Kitab al-Shifa (The Book of Healing), composed around 1027. The translation above follows the standard rendering of the passage as discussed in the secondary literature on the flying man argument, notably in the work of Michael Marmura. Because the original is Arabic and the passage is famous as a thought experiment rather than as a single fixed sentence, readers should treat this as an accurate translation of the argument's content rather than a single canonical wording.

Context

The flying man is the best-known thought experiment in medieval Islamic philosophy. Avicenna asks his reader to imagine a person who comes into existence all at once, fully formed, but with no contact with the external world: no sight, no hearing, no touch, suspended in air without even the sensation of falling. The question is whether such a person would still be aware of himself. Avicenna's answer is yes: even without any sensory input, the person would affirm his own existence. The argument belongs to his account of the soul (nafs), which he conceives not as a form of the body in Aristotle's sense alone, but as a substance that is aware of itself — an insight that anticipates the modern philosophy of consciousness and the Cartesian cogito.

Meaning

The flying man argument makes two claims. The first is epistemological: self-awareness is not derived from the senses. Our knowledge of ourselves does not come from perceiving our bodies or our actions; it is immediate and direct. Even a person deprived of every sensory channel would still know "I exist." The second is metaphysical: the self is not identical with the body. Because self-awareness survives the abstraction of every bodily function in the thought experiment, the self that is aware cannot be a mere body; it is a distinct reality, the soul. The argument thus serves Avicenna's dualist conclusion while anticipating the much later Cartesian method of doubt. For the history of philosophy, its significance is double: it is the first systematic thought experiment in the philosophy of self-knowledge, and it stands at the head of the Islamic tradition's great contribution to the philosophy of mind, six centuries before Descartes.

Related Wisdom

The flying man raises the deepest questions about knowledge and identity: what we know without the senses, and what the self is. Its claim that self-awareness is immediate connects to the long tradition of reflection on self-knowledge, from the Platonic injunction to know oneself through the Cartesian cogito to the modern philosophy of consciousness. And as a work of Islamic philosophy, it reminds us that the tradition of philosophical psychology is not exclusively Western: the great thinkers of the Islamic world were asking the questions of the philosophy of mind at the same time that the Latin tradition was just beginning to recover its Greek inheritance.