Al-Kindi’s On the Means of Dispelling Sorrows attempts to demonstrate the breadth of philosophical thought by adopting it within the practice of healing one’s personal afflictions (3). To do this, he creates a division between things that are permanent and things that are transient, and suggests suffering to be a result of the soul’s attachment to transient objects as if they were permanent. If this confused attachment causes suffering, then the opposite of suffering is a state which must consider the nature of generation and destruction and mediate its attachment accordingly. Furthermore, this favorable state also attempts to revert its attachment back to permanent things, the most permanent of which being the contents of the soul (1).
One must acquire this favorable state through knowledge of the process of generation and destruction, where knowledge itself becomes your “homeland”, “the gentle repose of your resting place” (1, The One True and Complete Agent…). In contrast, when Al-Kindi talks about the movements of the soul which lead to sorrow, he says that “… they [are performed] according to the confusion and the imagination of the intellect” (1, On the Means of Dispelling Sorrows). Here appears another dichotomy, between confusion and knowledge, where the question arises: is confusion itself the state from which knowledge comes forth?
If confusion is the state which propels one towards knowledge, then Al-Kindi could be said to be promoting a positive, life-affirming philosophy: within every moment of confusion, and hence suffering, arises the possibility of freedom from that suffering. But there could be another mediating factor, a state between confusion and knowledge. An obvious choice is curiosity. However, when consulting experience it seems that curiosity is preceded by an awareness of confusion. Pain itself seems to be the motivation for freedom from that pain. Curiosity seems to come later, once one has grasped some small amount of knowledge which causes one to be curious for more.
But whether confusion or curiosity is the means of acquiring knowledge, the end state for Al-Kindi is nonetheless a reversion back to the permanent nature of the soul. Here arises a paradox: The soul’s proposed permanence qualifies it as the only thing worthy of attachment, and yet the soul’s qualities are fed by the attachment to transient objects outside of it.
Even if the soul is permanent, it remains attached to experiences which form its constitution long after those experiences have taken place, thereby contradicting Al-Kindi’s idea that one must attach oneself in accordance with the transient nature of things. Attachment to experiences which cause states of yearning or nostalgia could be argued against, however could this be said for all experience? what about the “dignity a man gains through his wanderings over distant territories and uncharted seas, amid polar glaciers or beneath the torrid suns of the tropics” (2, p. 72)?
- McGinnis, J. and Reisman, D. (2007). Classical Arabic philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
- Lautréamont … de and Forestier, L. (1991). Les chants de Maldoror. Paris: Impr. Nationale.
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