154 CHAPTER SIX
a person’s behavior or understanding. With the disintegration of the
body, the vegetal and animal souls, which depend for their existence on
the bodily organs, also perish. The rational soul or the intellect can, how-
ever, hope for a survival in dependent of the body.
Whereas the Quranic description promises eternal bliss to all righ-
teous believers, irrespective of their intellectual level, the phi losophers tie
the reward to the individual’s intellectual achievements. They consider
the intellect to be the real “form” of the human being, that by which it
deserves to be called human. The material body is necessary for the acti-
vation of the human potential, but in itself this body is insignifi cant and
disappears with death. Only the realization of human potentiality allows
a person to survive beyond death. This realization occurs when a person
reaches during his lifetime understanding of the “separate forms” or
“separate intellects” that do not reside in matter. When a human being
contemplates these separate intellects and apprehends them, he is united
with them, and that part of him that grasped the eternal separate entities,
his intellect, becomes itself eternal. The object of contemplation is in par-
ticular the Active Intellect, which governs the sublunar world. The unifi -
cation or conjunction with the Active Intellect is the closest a human be-
ing can aspire to get to the realm of the divine. For the falasifa, therefore,
the conjunction with the Active Intellect is the foremost goal of human
beings. It is the completion of human perfection, and it alone guarantees
immortality and eternal reward. When speaking of the higher levels
awaiting perfect souls, the falasifa almost invariably speak of “felicity”
(saada, a translation of the Greek eudaimonia). Avicenna stands out
among the falasifa in his explicit insistence that souls retain their indi-
viduality even at the highest rank of immortality; but other falasifa, such
as Averroes, believed that at this level the souls conjoin also with each
other and lose their individuality.
Among the phi losophers, Avicenna is of par ticular importance for
understanding Maimonides. Attempting to explain “the Soul’s Felicity and
Misery After Death,” Avicenna says, “The divine phi losophers desire to
attain this felicity more than they desire the corporeal felicity. In fact, they
seem oblivious to the latter, and they do not deern it as anything of impor-
tance compared to that felicity which is close to the First Truth.”^2 Avicenna
describes in detail the plea sure of the cognitive faculty when it “observes
that which is absolute beauty and absolute good, when it is unifi ed with
it and is imprinted in its resemblance and arrangement, engraved in its
ways and becomes part of its substance.”^3 This state is comparable to
(^2) Ibn Sina,Risalat ahwal al- nafs wa- baqaiha wa- maadiha (Cairo, 1952), 126– 27; see
also AbuAli b. Sina,al-Najat (Cairo, 1321H), 477– 78.
(^3) Ahwal al- nafs, 130– 31;Najat, 480– 81.